by Mike Kimel California v. Red States, What Causes Growth, and the Great Stagnation Lately there has been a small cottage industry of California v. Texas comparisons, with California getting the apparent short end of the stick.  Heavily regulated, high tax, big gubmint California is the past, and free wheeling low tax small government Texas […]

by Dale Coberly TOM FRIEDMAN LIES THROUGH HIS GREAT BIG TEETH TELLS KIDS “KILL GRANDMA” You see, the Wolf (his friends call him Tom) had no reason to disguise himself as Grandmother. He had already met Little Red Riding Hood and talked to her like a friend. She saw him as the nice man in […]

One thing that several people have requested (including Mrs. Rdan) is more easily read material more accessible to non-finance readers, or with our AB audience also people well versed in finance and macro, without dumbing down the issues into ideas that have no context nor links to what actually happens in the world.   We […]

Lifted from reader rjs’s newsletter when comparing the Ryan outline and the Dem budget issues to be resolved: but this year, like each of the past three, that budget responsibility was again shirked, leaving us with government by “continuing resolution” which has resulted in as many as seven such short term funding bills in one […]

Excepts from an interview with Richard Wolff ( Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. And he is currently a Visiting Professor of the Graduate Program in International Affairs at the New School University in New York. Since 2008, he has been writing and speaking chiefly on the global capitalist crisis) from the […]

Lifted from Robert’s Stochastic Thoughts I am going to put two comments on Matt Yglesias’s blog here.  I am somewhat concerned.  My previous view on Yglesias is that I agree with him except on monetary policy (and the effect on asset price of Abe/Kuroda and of FOMC hints of possible tapering on asset prices particularly […]

by Linda Beale More Thinking on Ethics : How about Ethics and Economics A few days ago, I broached a question about “The Countermajoritarian Difficulty and Congressional Ethics“.  We seem to talk a good deal about congressional or political corruption, usually referring to elected officials taking bribes, commiting some kind of fraud such as failure […]

Scotusblog Round up quote: Commentary on Schuette comes from Richard Kahlenberg, who in an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal argues that “[a] ruling in Schuette that promotes race-neutral strategies to boost minority admissions would reinforce the message the court tried to deliver last term in Fisher v. University of Texas but has largely fallen […]

Eric Cantor rules on the debt ceiling?  From Talking Points Memo comes this bit of knowledge on who can propose a vote on the debt. Under normal House rules, according to House Democrats, once that bill had been rejected again by the Senate, then any member of the House could have made a motion to […]