Is the US trade deficit a problem? Are we somehow incapable of competing in the international market? Is there anything good about being such a debtor nation to China? Is the US really losing jobs to other countries? These issues are heated. People are passionate about their views. Yet, it seems most people don’t understand […]
by Linda Beale Tax Filing Season Delay The IRS announced that the 16-day federal shutdown will cause a delay in the start of tax filing season by a week to two weeks. The exact date when returns will first be accepted, to be announced in December, was to have been January 21, but may now […]
Greg Mankiw had an interesting post today pointing out that bond returns calculated by the economist were incorrect. http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/ Mankiw wrote: Here is a question for students who are learning about compounding. What is wrong with the following passage from The Economist magazine? Investors who bought Treasury bonds in 1946, when yields were around current levels, […]
James Hamilton at econbrowser has a fascinating post titled, “Why isn’t inflation lower?” He presents a paper titled, Is The Phillips Curve Alive and Well After All? Inflation Expectations and the Missing Disinflation, written by Olivier Coibion at UT Austin and NBER and Yuriy Gorodnichenko at UC Berkeley and NBER. It would not be easy […]
Via the Washington Post: Here’s David Cay Johnston, interviewed by Joshua Holland (link from Joseph Delaney), in response to a question about “why we have a very low tax burden overall, relative to other wealthy countries, but a lot of Americans feel that they’re being taxed to death?”: Well, one of the reasons some Americans […]
by Linda Beale Time to Eliminate the Debt Ceiling As the post-shutdown resumption of talking in Congress gets underway and the days start counting down to the next debt ceiling deadline (perhaps brought along sooner by the delay in the tax filing startup, as discussed in the last post), I suppose we must all at […]
Lifted from Robert’s Thoughts: Who said it ? 2013 edition “that which the American people have been waiting for for the last 200 years, politicians listening to the people instead of the ruling class” That would be far right tea-partier Raul Labrador (R-Idaho) The mountain West is red. Red Staters vs the capitalist class. In […]
Maggie and I have discussed this topic on several occasions and she tackled it here at: The Health Beat Blog. In the general public, it always surfaces as accusations of a sell out to the insurance companies. It is unfortunate we could not have Medicare for all or single payor; but, the political environment at […]
Click on the title to view the YouTube link. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=0cW8Wo1uvyU If you like your plan and doctors, you can keep them . . . even if it will cost you twice as much as it might under the PPACA . . . huh??? What idiot would pay more for a plan with similar or fewer […]