We’re used to that line by now. Ross Perot—one of the more prominent people who got rich due to government contracts—used it, Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman are using it (while desperately hoping you don’t pay attention to how they ran Lucent/HP or eBay), and Aaron Sorkin even had Charles Grodin say it in Dave, […]

I spent the last hours of last night watching the PBS “Human Experience” episode on the Civilian Conservation Corps. A few million people put to work: for long hours, living in Army barracks, with all but $5 of their pay having to be sent home every week. Gosh, sounds just right as part of FDR’s […]

The WSJ and the Commerce Department realize what everyone else already knew. The recession was deeper — and subsequent recovery slower — than the government originally estimated, the Commerce Department said Friday.

The sarcasm of the title of my recent post notwithstanding, there are some things economists understand to be true that are. Among those: People respond to incentives As with the Supreme Court, economists extend this principle to organizations, on the (generally correct) idea that organizations are made up of people who act in their own […]

As Brad DeLong has noted, Tim Geithner believes it is time for “the economy has now recovered sufficiently for government to begin to make way for private business investment.”  In short, he expects “the private sector” to do the heavy lifting in these joyous times of economic recovery. Cynics among us—why, yes, that might well […]

UPDATE: Jason Linkins at one of the non-Breast-Enhanced sites of the Huffington Post did a burlesque of which I can only dream on the same piece. Via Chris Hayes’s Twitter feed (and he got it from David Sirota), the following is from “No more ‘me first’ mentality on entitlements“: While it does not happen often, […]

It was their idea, so it’s no surprise they like paying interest on reserves, even excess reserves: For quite a while, the Fed was quite happy to have that money on its books. Indeed, the power to pay interest on reserves was considered a key tool to keep control over all the liquidity the Fed […]

The WSJ Economics Blog, discussing June 2010 unemployment rates by state, uses the headline “Most Regions Show Improvement“* I suppose we should be encouraged by the headline and not look at the text: Washington, DC and 16 states recorded jobless rates in excess of 10%. North and South Dakota continued to have the lowest rates […]

Went to Massacghusetts for the weekend, where I learned that Martha Coakley supports child rapists* and Scott Brown (R-MA Sen.) is a decent legislator who stands by his convictions, including his opposition to the Financial Services Reform Act, which principled action he takes because the act institutionalizes Too Big to Fail. (This is also Russ […]

“Stately, Plump Buck Mulligan.” Unless you’re a chubby chaser, it’s not an image that one immediately thinks of as licentious. After a few days, Apple is at least considering this. (The headline appears to jump the gun.) Yes, it’s that time of the year again.