I wrote a post with this title which is poor, solitary, nasty, and long over at Robert’s stochastic thoughts. the bottom line is I say Friedman was always a Keynesian except for his insistence that the effect of the nominal interest rate on money demand is more or less pretty much negligible. This means that […]

@sethcotlar has a very excellent thread asking never Trump conservatives what really changed with Trump. He says he is willing to be convinced that Trump isn’t just letting the mask drop and saying the quiet parts out loud, but that they haven’t made a case that Conservativism was ever worth anything. Zack Beauchamp fair used […]

So there wasn’t the groundswell of interest in my old axes in comments, so all continued grinding after the jump. Just to recall I stopped after 3 on a list which continued 4) John Kerry is much too stubborn. He won’t admit it when he is wrong. He should be more willing flip flop 5) […]

There are too many guns in the USA. If you don’t agree, no need to bother reading on. The market oriented solution is obvious, has no Constitutional problems, and is simple. 1) tax gun production and imports. They don’t grow on trees. A tax of $ 5000 per gun would be useful. Better a higher […]

This post is self therapy and probably not worth your time. Outline before the Jump 1) Hillary Clinton is very honest. Too honest 2) Mitt Romney is extremely dishonest. He lies often and without shame. Also he made his money conning ex friends. 3) John McCain was a major flip-flopper 4) John Kerry is much […]

This post will be especially confused. I am thinking about cash bail and how it is unacceptable that richer people have more liberty than poorer people. For some reason my thoughts turned to Jeffrey Epstein currently held without bail, because of course. Now he hasn’t been convicted yet, and I do support the 5th and […]

I really enjoy Rick Wilson’s thoughts on the Republican Party, his former party until 3 years ago. I don’t know which part of his latest Washington Post Op-ed I like most but here goes: As the saying goes, you had one job, Republicans. Now? Your job really isn’t representing your districts. It’s backfilling and wallpapering […]

Monetary policy is roughly the only issue on which I regularly disagree with Matt Yglesias. So it is boring to note that I agree with almost everything he wrote in his Vox article on the recently announced 0.25% Federal Funds target rate cut. His main assertions are: – it is a very reasonable move even […]

Kevin Drum notes conservative hackitude. I’m just going to fair use the whole post (please click the link so I don’t feel guilty) I would like to offer a comment on the hack gap this morning: It’s remarkable the number of liberal economists who continue to favor an interest rate cut from the Fed. They […]

Why is the 2% inflation target sacred ? A very strong case can be made that a higher target would be better, because it would mean normal nominal interest rates are further from the (near) zero lower bound. DeLong and Summers made this point in the 90s . AEA President and former IMF head economist […]