Compare: When people realize that their most personal, sensitive, intimate, private health-care information is in the hands of the IRS that’s been willing to use people’s tax information against political opponents of this administration, then people have pause and they pull back in horror. — Michele Bachmann, on ABC News/Yahoo, May 20 (H/T Glenn Kessler, […]

As I have written before, when states announce a major new investment, it is far more likely that the announced subsidy is an underestimate than an overestimate. A new Good Jobs First study commissioned by the United Auto Workers unearths a new example of this, which I believe is the largest underestimate ever: Nissan in […]

This line by Matt McOsker, in a comment on one of my recent posts, now reigns as the best line of the year in my personal pantheon. QE’s only direct effect is on the financial sector. It only affects the real sector — where people work to produce, buy, and sell real goods, and produce […]

The intellectual equivalent of medieval bloodletting: “We’ll just drain out the bad blood!“ Cross-posted at Asymptosis.

Steve Easterbrook offers this quick timeline on climatology.   In particular, the movies and animations at the end, including the IPSL one, are very interesting and a lot of fun. See  Timeline of climate modeling

by Linda Beale Another reason for NOT cutting Social Security benefits–seniors poorer than you think As everybody knows, a constant refrain of the far-right GOP establishment is a desire to cut taxes for the wealthy while cutting benefits for the poor. The ideological right talks about benefits for the poor as “welfare” but never talks […]

Angry Bear readers are familiar with Mark’s writings: Mark Thoma is a macroeconomist and time-series econometrician at the University of Oregon. His research focuses on how monetary policy affects the economy, and he has also worked on political business cycle models. Mark is currently a fellow at The Century Foundation, a columnist at The Fiscal […]

By Noni Mausa A Nation of the Non-productive? Over on Brad deLong’s blog, I tossed off a comment. Thought it was a throw-away, but is it really? ======= Now and then for fun, I dip into the Wealth of Nations. Here’s a snippet from the beginning of Chapter III: ““A man grows rich by employing […]

by Linda Beale The IRS tale–Times letter writers seem to get it (or at least, most of them anyway) As I’ve noted in several posts on A Taxing Matter (see links, below), the media and right-wing “hearing” frenzy continues over the purported IRS “scandal” from “targeting” conservative groups for extra scrutiny in determining whether to […]