Hmm, anything unusual in the world? Well, Greg Sargent tries to perpetuate the Myth of Moderate (but of course Unnamed) Republican Senators. Stan Collender gets punked. Nothing new on the first, but Collender’s previous piece about the realities of the Ancestral Party gives the lie to Sargent’s delusion. Economics version: the Republican Party is at […]
Reader mmcosker sends this e-mail pointing to Why Social Security Can’t go Bankrupt: Rerun at Forbe’s Magazine: John T. Harvey’s Pragmatic Economics column at Forbes is one of the best. He is a Professor of Economics at Texas Christian University, and has a knack for breaking down politically charged “third rail” economic topics into terms […]
I don’t know about you, but when I recently updated this chart I was pleasantly surprised by how much the deficit had improved. In the third quarter of 2012 –the last quarter of the previous fiscal year — the deficit had already fallen to 7.0% of GDP as compared to the peak of 10.5% in […]
A note from Wonkblog For anybody who cares about how the country ended up in this precarious economic state, a very big day is coming soon, as information that has been under lock and key for the past five years will be shared with the world. The Federal Reserve keeps transcripts of its meetings to […]
The Washington Post calls attention to changes in measuring international trade values: The U.S. trade deficit with China may be much smaller than thought according to new trade measurements that capture the flow of raw materials and intermediate goods as they work their way around the world into final products. In a significant revision to […]
by Linda Beale Trillion Dollar Coins, Fourteenth Amendment Powers, Executive Duties versus the Zanies on the Right who Want to Send us to Economic Purgatory: Krugman on the dysfunctional politics of the US economy Paul Krugman appeared on Bill Moyers PBS program Sunday night, talking sanely and rationally about the economy and why jobs (should) […]
Via TBogg comes this picture from the WSJ: Kudos to Xenos at Reading Is For Snobs for finding this graphic from the Wall Street Journal portraying the devastation inflicted upon The Poors in post-Fiscal Cliff Obama Socialism Nation:
Today, in another step forward, the National Review calls on Republicans to take the threat of default off the table: Republicans should recognize that the prospect of default is the Democrats’ chief weapon in their campaign of avoidance. That prospect is not a source of Republican leverage in the debt-ceiling fight; it is the primary […]
Okay. There’s no way to do justice to Washington Post centerist columnist Dana Milbank’s column today about Obama’s “presser” yesterday by just summarizing it or quoting a sentence or short paragraph from it. And justice for that column, titled “President Congeniality talks tough,” is what I want. So here are the first six (blessedly short) […]
Warning: a thought just came to me. It might be totally wrong. A little knowledge of the law is dangerous. The idea is that the Fed can buy US federal government issued securities at will so I think it could buy one random T-bill for $ 1 trillion if it chose to do so. The […]