I will probably publish a much longer post after I edit out some of the rudeness.  This isn’t just convention season it is also Jackson Hole Monetary Conference season.  There is quite a lot of discussion of forward guidance, that is public statements about monetary policy in the medium distant future.  Many pages of it […]

Matt Miller has an excellent column in The Washington Post in which he coins the phrase “Drawbridge Republicans.” Basically he accuses Romney and Ryan of being pro-rich class warriors who aim to eliminate equality of outcome and of opportunity. A very standard Rhetorical gesture is to concede in the second or third paragraph of an […]

I associate the phrase “unconventional monetary policy” with Joe Gagnon. Here we were in 2008 with the conventional monetary instrument — the target Federal Funds rate — pedal to the metal and the economy stalling. Many people said it was time for fiscal stimulus (I think Gagnon agreed). He also suggested unconventional monetary policy, by […]

Ed Kilgore’s thought develops as he finally faces facts. He wrote It is entirely unsurprising that Paul Ryan and his many supporters have been advertising the [skip]in his budget proposal as the greatest thing since the Clinton-era welfare reform legislation. What is surprising is that some progressives seem to be going along with the characterization […]

One interesting Romneycampaign tic is to use “numerous” to mean two. Examples of this abuse of “numerous” follow. 1. “After extensive hearings the bipartisan [Massachusetts] Ballot Law Commission came to the same conclusion as numerous independent fact checkers in finding that Mitt Romney ended his active employment with Bain Capital in 1999.” The numerous fact […]

At this point, the question mark is needed just in case the Romney campaign is deliberately trying to trick the rest of us. This seems to me to be politically insane. Ryan is the guy who wanted to end Medicare and replace it with a fundamentally different program based on vouchers whose value would not […]

Mitt Romney proposes reducing tax brackets by 20% and cutting the estate tax (to zero IIRC). He will keep or expand favored treatment of capital gains and dividends. He claims that he doesn’t plan to cut taxes for the rich. He claims that he will avoid such cuts by eliminating deductions, credits and exclusions. One […]

I generally agree with Paul Krugman, so it is exiting that I am outraged by something he wrote (I’ve calmed down now). Paul Krugman says that scratchpads are useful. They are sloppy easy models which are not taken seriously. Or maybe which shouldn’t be taken seriously, but it’s not a big problem that many powerful […]

Jonathan Chait argues both that the debate about Romney and Bain is idiotic and he participates in it. His contribution is definitely idiotic if he is right that the debate is stupid. It is also idiotic if it isn’t stupid, because he ignored what is true and what is false when writing about what is […]

G. has to leave the Eurozone. No not Greece Germany. Germany and a bunch of small Northern countries use the undervalued Northern Euro as their currency while we use the over valued Mediterranian and Irish (or Catholic and Orthodox) Euro. We need one more flexible exchange rate somewhere between them and the Sea. If Greek […]