Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

Same-Sex Marriage In Illinois? No Basis for Objection

by Linda Beale (op-ed) Same-Sex Marriage In Illinois? No Basis for Objection In the US today, 9 states and the District of Colombia have legalized same-sex marriages and 9 states (counting Colorado, where the legislature passed a civil union bill on March 13) have legalized some form of civil union or domestic partnership for same-sex […]

Beliefs and economics

New study finds wealthy are different? via Alternet.  Since today and yesterday is shaping up to be deficit days in posts from me, this note caught my attention: One especially significant difference between the opinions of the wealthy and the population as a whole centers on deficit reduction. According to a study cited by Demos, […]

Budget buzz

Reader rjs has a link filled write up on the budget proposals coming out last week with a note on the economic thoughts on the matter: There was quite a bit of unwarranted buzz around the blogosphere about a number of budget plans that were introduced early this week, all of which were likely an […]

The Cyclically Adjusted Budget Balance: Shrinking Rapidly

Since I put a ‘liberal’ name in a previous post, I will also put up a ‘conservative’ name on budget balances: Menzie Chin at Econbrowser points to other CBO numbers… The Cyclically Adjusted Budget Balance: Shrinking Rapidly The CBO has just released estimates of the cyclically adjusted budget balance (or, specifically, the budget balance without automatic […]

The United States long term debt problem

Michael Linden from Center for American Progress addresses one aspect of using CBO projections, especially the June 2012 report. Best to walk it through with him based on the June report and subsequent reports…good for several posts more is how the current situation is still improving on the debt to GDP ratio so much talked […]

Future Blog Platform

Shortly Angry Bear will be making the switch from Blogger to WordPress.  Blogger has served us well for ten years, but WordPress provides a much greater flexibility and capacity for our material.  Reader rjs comments on Google reader coming to an end which won’t affect us as a blog, but certainly impacts users: I imagine […]

Revealed Preference

by Mike Kimel Revealed Preference This week came news that Rob Portman, a Republican senator from Ohio, is bucking his party and reversing his own long-held position on gay marriage. Now that his son has come out as gay, he supports it. From an article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer by reporter Sabrina Eaton: Republican […]

WHISKEY SOUR: No, Sen. Alexander, and, no, Ruth Marcus, Mitch McConnell Is Not Everett Dirksen. So Sorry.

Everett McKinley Dirksen (January 4, 1896 – September 7, 1969) was an American politician of the Republican Party. He represented Illinois in the U.S. House of Representatives (1933–1949) and U.S. Senate (1951–1969). As Senate Minority Leader for a decade, he played a highly visible and key role in the politics of the 1960s, including helping […]

Finance and belief in how markets work

Via Naked Capitalism comes this post from Cathy O’Niel, Black Scholes and the normal distribution. form her blog mathbabe. (re-posted with permission from the author). There have been lots of comments and confusion, especially in this post, over what people in finance do or do not assume about how the markets work. I wanted to dispel […]