David Zetland writes more on pricing water in relation to energy concerns at Growing Blue: Water, energy and the economy …let’s set aside the issue of environmental water and concentrate on water as a resource that can be used for economic activities. Most resource water is managed, priced and distributed by local monopolies, whether it’s […]
Peter Dorman at Econospeak writes a letter to Bank of America: The Moral Imperative of a Debt Ceiling From this morning’s New York Times: Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York, signed on to the trillion-dollar [platinum] coin plan, telling Capital New York: “It sounds silly but it’s absolutely legal. And it would normally not […]
by Linda Beale McConnell Tossing the Gauntlet on Debt, Taxes and the GOP’s dream of dismantling Social Security and Medicare Pretty much as I predicted, Obama’s failure to go over the fiscal cliff–instead “negotiating” and settling for a half-assed deal that hardly got rid of any of the stupidities of the Bush tax cuts–convinced the […]
by Linda Beale Lew almost official as nominee for Treasury Secretary Media headlines continue to tout Obama’s white male choices for rounding out his ‘new’ cabinet. Latest to the list is that he has offered his Jacob Lew, his current White House Chief of Staff, the post of Treasury Secretary. See, e.g., Obama to tap […]
From an interview at Real News with Patrick Bond (the Director of the Center for Civil Society and Professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa): And the idea is that if you value the environment, you should put a price tag on it so that its destruction is not just a [free] activity—so […]
by Mike Kimel Why Much of the Population Thinks Economists are Charlatans Noah Smith asks why people think economists are charlatans. He concludes it has something to do with trade. I submit the answer is much, much simpler, and I think it deals with the part of economics which has most visibility with the public: macroeconomics. Read this post from […]
From a website called Daily Writ today, in a post called “Likelihood of a Petition Being Granted”: There are a lot of numbers thrown out about the likelihood of a cert. petition being granted. The number I’ve always heard is 1%, but I sometimes hear numbers as high as 5%. According to statistics from the […]
Gavin Kennedy reminds us that handy metaphors used to sell fictions about either free markets or ‘the force’ at work are just that: Smith is a conjecture about the virtues of a free-market economy”, is so absurd as to be embarrassing. That Adam Smith favoured “a free market economy” is approximately correct. That he asserted that a […]
[I]sn’t it paramount the president explain to the public what the debt ceiling issue actually is, rather than allowing the Republicans to keep misinforming the public that it’s an increase in budget allocations rather than a payment for budget allocations already made? This quirk in the law–the requirement that Congress authorize payment of costs already […]