August brings us the annual Irish immigration data, so it’s time to look at what has happened in their statistical reporting “year” that ended in April 2014. While better than last year, it’s still not pretty. According to the Central Statistics Office, net emigration continued in 2013-14, with net emigration of 21,400. a decline of […]

Update appended below. (Second indented quote format also corrected.) —- In the Comments thread to Dan Crawford’s post below titled “Kalamazoo County Michigan…People and Offices to Write to Protest the Stealing of a Home,” I wrote: Dan, you don’t understand. This is freedom, see. I mean, it’s not like it’s the FEDERAL government that’s doing […]

  When someone says, “if we raise the minimum wage, there will be more unemployment.” That may be true, but their fear of unemployment is not wise. It is better to say, “if we raise the minimum wage, will net social benefits be increased?” When someone says, “if the Fed had gradually raised the Fed […]

Stephanie Kelton offers the story of government on a macro level that is understandable: The full version of the debate including the Q&A session at the end is available on our YouTube channel.

John Boehner says that unemployed Americans are pretty clearly malingerers, bums on welfare who have decided that they don’t feel like working: “This idea that has been born, maybe out of the economy over the last couple years, that you know, I really don’t have to work. I don’t really want to do this. I think […]

Via the Guardian comes a few words on the drought and markets for, in this case, almonds.  But similar things could be said of other crops.  The ‘subsidized’ cost of getting water to these producers is not reflected in prices, nor is the ‘ownership’ of the water  looked at in a comprehensive manner for sustainability, as […]

Via Alternet comes this disturbing story. Deborah Calley told WITI that she paid cash for her dream home in 2010. She had thought that it would make raising two children easier while she was recovering from the traumatic car accident. But that dream was shattered when she was notified that the county was foreclosing on […]

Now that the Fed has sent the message that nominal rates will stay at the ZLB for a considerable time after October, let’s revisit the concept of the Zombie firm. The ZLB Fed rate makes it more likely that zombie firms will continue to limp on… Zombie firms are not good for society. The main […]

Having raised a family in Mad City, Wisconsin (a place former governor Dreyfuss called “77 square miles surrounded by reality” and others calling it the Left Coast of Wisconsin, I found the state to be open to new ideas and more so than what is found in other states. Of course things have changed with […]