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

Winston (not Smith) and Myths

by Robert Waldmann Karen Tumulty wrote a good article including one bad sentence on the Republican all the eggs in the Obamacare basket case strategy. “In Winston’s view, it is a myth that the last midterm election was swung by voter outrage about Obama’s health-care proposal, which was then being debated in Congress.”

Julie Boonstra, Americans for Prosperity, and the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire Trial

The Tea Party group Americans for Prosperity has now released its factual documentation for its misleading ad featuring Julie Boonstra, a Michigan woman stricken with Leukemia who suggests Obamacare forced her to take on a new plan that is now “unaffordable.” The ad has been widely pilloried ever since Glenn Kessler discovered that her premiums […]

Half of What’s Wrong With the Recovery in One Chart

Simple national income and product accounting tells us that the current US recover (I can barely manage to type that without scare quotes and I *hate* scare quotes) has been horrible for two reasons: low government purchases of goods and services (G) and low housing investment. Consumption, fixed non residential investment, and inventory investment have […]

Not even Americans For Prosperity can defeat Glenn Kessler’s love of "both sides"

by Robert Waldmann Not even Americans For Prosperity can defeat Glenn Kessler’s love of “both sides” I mean that he loves the phrase “both sides”. This fact check is pretty much “Opinions on shape of planet differ. Both sides overstate their case.” He is discussing a grotesquely dishonest ad by Americans for Prosperity about an […]

Why Are So Many Americans Confused About Obamacare? How a Video Produced by CBS’ Washington Bureau Misled Millions –Part 1 Updated

run75441: I have been out and about to Thailand and China again so I have had not had a lot of time to contribute. Just reading the many comments on Robert Waldman and Beverly Mann’s well written articles gives a snapshot of how many people do not understand the PPACA and really do not care […]

Are economist’s rational?

I just couldn’t skip this one…disinhibition and odd “metaphor” combined: Lynn Parramour writes:   Thomas Ferguson and Robert Johnson of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, two economists who have tried to expose the problems in their field, remind us that even when you look at the evidence of recent reports of the trustees overseeing […]

Basic v. Levinson

From the New York Times According to the plaintiffs in the new case, the Supreme Court has not overruled a statutory precedent in an area in which Congress has been active since 1961, in a tax case. But lawyers for the defendants said the 1988 decision was entitled to “lessened precedential weight” because it was […]

The Accelerator

I’ve decided to look at US economic aggregates using theory and statistical methods which were popular in the 1960s. I have long told students that the model of investment which best fits the data is the now ancient flexible accelerator. This is just a reduced form equation without theory. It just says that the ratio […]