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

Apparently there’s a special place in hell for Democratic politicians who criticize Barack Obama as insufficiently progressive. And a special place in heaven for politicians who have accepted $133,246 from the private-prisons industry but tell Black and Hispanic voters at a debate shortly before the Nevada caucuses and South Carolina primary that they want to end the private-prison system.

Nicholas Kristof  ✔@NickKristof Clinton is accusing Sanders of being anti-Obama. Feels fake and contrived to me, and rather nasty. 10:47 PM – 11 Feb 2016 Twitter ___ What worries me more than anything else about a Clinton general election campaign is her propensity to say obviously silly things. Elsewhere in that speech, in Clinton, IA […]

Monetary Policy in an Open Economy

by Joseph Joyce Monetary Policy in an Open Economy The recent research related to the trilemma (see here) confirms that policymakers who are willing to sacrifice control of the exchange rate or capital flows can implement monetary policy. For most central banks, this means using a short-term interest rate, such as the Federal Funds rate […]

‘Both of us share the goal of this and that. But only one of us will try to score the goal.’

This is not about math — this is about people’s lives, and we should level with the American people.  Every progressive economist who has analyzed that say the numbers don’t add up. And we should level with the American people about what we can do to get quality affordable health care. — Hillary Clinton, at […]

Drum on Sanders on Welfare Reform

Kevin Drum wrote “Here’s Why Bernie Sanders Doesn’t Say Much About Welfare Reform” He presents a graph of total social welfare spending in the USA divided by the number of people in households under 150% of the poverty line. He concludes “There are two obvious takeaways from this. First, overall spending on social welfare programs […]

Do Canadians and Scandinavians Really Not Work and Really Have No Children? (This is a rhetorical question for Kathleen Parker. Or maybe not rhetorical; you decide.)

Socialism has always appealed to the young, the cure for which isn’t age but responsibility. This usually comes in the form of taxes and children, both of which involve working and sacrificing for the benefit of others, the extent of which forms the axis upon which all politics turns. That Sanders never outgrew his own […]