We are a country not just divided, but fragmented along axes of race, age, religion, economic status and geography.  There are now 15 States where citizens have filed petitions to secede from the Union.  “These include Louisiana (which led the charge), the Republic of Texas, Kentucky, Colorado, New Jersey, Montana, North Dakota, Indiana, Mississippi, North […]

by Linda Beale Is it a fiscal cliff or merely a bump in the road? Sixty percent of American voters in exit polls indicated that they supported higher taxes for the wealthy, see here.  Even some arch conservatives are acknowledging that some tax increases won’t do terrible harm.  Id. (noting that the Wall Street Journal’s […]

Apparently Angry Bear comments have been the subject of a spam bombardment, mostly about buying prescription drugs but also sports equipment. I have contacted the Blogger team by e-mail, and have asked other Bears to help keep current comment sections clear so readers can maintain their comments on posts. Sorry for the annoyance. I miss […]

Via Business Insider, Joe Weisenthal offers a look at the explosion of media covering the notion of ‘fiscal cliff’. I was going to list representative links but gave up…I leave it to readers to supply their own sources for this post. The issue has been framed as mostly an ideological and partisan battle, with a […]

Via Taxprof blogWall Street Journal: Tax Twist: At Some Firms, Cutting Corporate Rates May Cost Billions: What Uncle Sam has given to the earnings of companies like Citigroup, AIG, and Ford he soon might take away. President Barack Obama has said, most recently during last month’s presidential debates, that the 35% U.S. corporate tax rate […]

by Mike Kimel Posterity I think you have to go back to Bob Dole in 1996 to find a Republican nominee for for President whose signature accomplishment wouldn’t be repudiated by most members of his own party in November 2012. The 2000 and 2004 nominee is best known for turning a surplus into a deficit […]

I’d like to interject a very concrete example into the large swirl of quite theoretical, thought-experiment discussion about whether “demand for money” means “demand for the medium of exchange” or “demand for the medium of account.” Scott Sumner and Nick Rowe are, as so often, at the center of this discussion. But before I do, […]

Andrew C. Thomas  asks about Silver’s uncertainty estimates.  (via @nikete) My very confident guess was that Silver’s forecasts were too cautious — that his probability estimates were too close to 50 %, that he underestimated the precision of his point forecasts. It is actually easy to check my hypothesis (not that I did) by looking at […]

We are now mostly through Week 10 of the NFL season, which means most teams have played nine games. Unless Kansas City manages to beat Pittsburgh by more than 36 points on Monday*—not, to be gracious about it, the Way to Bet—there will be four teams in the NFL that have give up between 10 […]