Max Ehrenfreund and Roberto Ferdman report the latest news in today’s Washington Post Tens of thousands of Americans just lost their food stamps A 20-year-old rule that was suspended in many places during the recession requires that adults without children or disabilities have a job to receive food stamps for more than three months, and […]
This is a post about macroeconomic theory. It is technical and I honestly don’t know how much is already in the literature. The aim is to address an important policy question — is public debt a burden on future generations. It is possible in theory that the answer is no and that higher public debt […]
I find this vox.com post by Natahnael Johnson even more interesting than their very high average. It is a paean to genentically modified bananas originally published at Grist. The Grist (and Vox) headline people tease “These vitamin-fortified bananas might get you thinking differently about GMOs”. Johnson should be glad it didn’t get me thinking differently […]
Update: It appears that I may have been completely confused. Never mind. BillB wrote in comments that the numbers from Alaska refer to delegates to the state convention which will chose the delegates to the national convention. I do see the numbers under the heading “votes” on various sites, but I think that is a […]
Trump is running as a bombastic billionaire progressive. His argument (to the extent that he has one) is that he is already rich so he doesn’t have to serve the rich. However, he also officially promised the yugest tax cut of all the candidates. I think this makes no political sense. Obviously he wants to […]
Ross Douthat and Stand Collender wonder why Paul Ryan is acting like a fan of Ayn Rand. Douthat notes Repeatedly Harwood presses him on whether the party needs to change to address the concerns of the blue-collar Republicans who are voting for Trump. And every time, as The Week’s James Pethokoukis pointed out afterward, Ryan […]
No not just because she is a woman. Not just because she is a woman and her unfavorables are 12 points above her favorables (according to the Huffington Post smoother) 1) She is attempting to be elected as a non-incumbent Democrat. 2) The top marginal income tax rate is less than 69%. 3) The 16th […]
You owe it to yourself to read “How We Fooled Donald Trump Into Retweeting Benito Mussolini” True genius expressed through the limited limited medium of twitter. Orwell would have been proud. Also Will Rogers, Moliere and Aristophanes. Our Fascist bot was anything but subtle. It was, after all, directly named after Mussolini. The New York […]
The debate between Gerald Friedman and the economics profession seems to be settled — Friedman agrees that he may have made a mistake. It is really unfair to him that preliminary unpublished analysis received so much attention (mostly from the Sanders campaign). Oh and it is unfair to them to expect them to ignore favorable […]
A 20th anniversary reminder that an authentic randomized control trial proved beyond all conventional statistical significance levels and all reasonable doubt that welfare reform killed people. I will just note a very crude calculation. The experimental point estimate is that Florida’s welfare reform caused death rates to increase by 16%. This is a huge gigantic […]