Greg Mankiw suggests a part of the new budget proposed by President Obama affects 401k and IRA accounts. Some comment in general retirement accounts from AB starts here. Apparently, President Obama’s budget is going to include some kind of penalty for people who have accumulated more than $3 million in retirement accounts.  The details are not […]

The title should actually be “How Dollar Bills Move,” but it’s not as alliterative. A fascinating item on the work of Dirk Brockmann, who’s used WheresGeorge.com to map the movement of dollar bills, and the boundaries over which they’re least likely to cross: I have no idea what to do with this, or whether it […]

Steve Randy Waldman and Scott Sumner (plus many others, linked from Steve’s post) wade in on notions of saving and investment. (I’m endlessly amazed that the best econothinkers on the web — add Nick Rowe, Andy Harless, David Beckworth, Josh Mason, and many others to the list — constantly feel the need to think, re-think, […]

Margaret Thatcher, Polarizing Right-Winger The major news media celebrated Margaret Thatcher upon her death.  They seem to praise her stubbornness and ability to move the UK to support her very conservative anti-union, pro-deregulation and privatization policies and talk of her impact on the UK.  David Brooks, a typical voice on the right who saw Thatcher […]

Ex Macroeconomist Noah Smith argues that it is a good thing that there are professional macroeconomists.  He has two arguments 1) So does this mean that macro research is useless for policymaking? No! Not at all!! Because here’s an interesting thing about policymaking: No matter who advises the policymakers, policy is going to get made. […]

Erica Payne sent out a request for writeups from Patriotic Millionaires members, and I provided this. I hate not to re-use perfectly good copy… I live (quite well) off financial investments — no need to work any more — and my taxes every year are ridiculously, embarrassingly low. Meanwhile tens, hundreds of millions of hard […]

Matthew Yglesias riffs off my recent post, “Saving” ≠ “Saving Resources,” and there’s been quite a bit of commentary there, plus on Asymptosis and Angry Bear (plus a bit of twitter talk that I can’t figure out how to link to easily and usefully). There are a dozen things I want to discuss on the […]

by Linda Beale Obama caves yet again: offering Social Security cuts to appease the right… Obama’s budget isn’t even released yet and he’s already caving to the “let’s make the rich richer and forget the rest” crowd.  That crowd that claims that we need a capital gains preference so the rich can gather all that […]

What you don’t know can hurt you. I think that’s a clear lesson of some so-called trade agreements the United States has signed over the last 20 years, and illustrated further by the few that have been defeated, most notably the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, negotiated by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development from1995 […]