It’s easy as ABC Hilariously, the result of Ryan’s Dave-like search through the budget — and the only example of a putative budget savings mentioned anywhere in the piece — is his claim to have discovered a savings in the student loan program. In fact, this example is exactly the opposite of what Ryan (and […]

Last night and today I watched on Al Jazeera (streaming) what sure looks like a Egyptian revolution. At the moment Hosni Mubarak is still President, however, he is not in control. The apparent turning point occured when he sent the army to suppress demonstrations after the vastly outnumbered security police didn’t manage. This is a […]

He wrote The right kind of focused, temporary government spending can also be a powerful job creator. Over the next generation, we desperately need to improve our road, air, and rail networks and to modernize our systems for distributing electricity. We should be doing as much as possible of this work now, to spur recovery. […]

I don’t disagree with Ezra Klein often, so it is all the more pleasant to answer his rhetorical question. He wrote As a general point, I think “making people take semi-embarrassing votes” is vastly overrated in American politics. Can anyone think of a campaign that even partly turned on one of these gambits? It should […]

ddrew2u Beginner’s question: I was reading Krugman’s long article on how the Euro allowed weak countries to borrow on the same easy terms as strong countries — leading to the usual (e.g., Irish) bankers lending excess monies to people who can’t pay back. The usual cure — if a country has its own currency — […]

What’s Brad DeLong always typing about ? We have a better press corps. It’s just that they all work for McClatchy. David Lightman shows how to report that someone is lying without using the word The report says that a study by the National Federation of Independent Business, “the nation’s largest small business association, found […]

Paul Krugman has been outdone by someone else who works for the New York Times “Opinions on Shape of Earth Differ; Both Sides Have a Point” was exteme but “In Battle Over Health Law, Math Cuts Both Ways” is the epitome of a nadir. The key word which Krugman missed is “math”. To Krugman math […]

As the title indicates, this will be a more than usually confused post.The stimulus was the now famous grief over elementary fairness which errupted when “[Judge] Scott Fairgrieve of Nassau County District Court, wrote that ‘swearing to false statements reflects poorly on the profession [of law] as a whole” and fined lawyer Steven J Baum […]

LA Times (via John Chait). The projected cost of the $700-billion financial bailout fund — initially feared to be a huge hit to taxpayers — continues to drop, with the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimating Monday that losses would amount to just $25 billion. That’s a sharp drop from the CBO’s last estimate, in August, […]

Ezra Klein explains that Medicare can’t cut payments too much or doctors will opt out The problem is that Medicare can’t control costs too much better than private insurers or, as you see from the article above, doctors will simply abandon Medicare. Klein seems oddly indifferent to the detailed text of the Afordable Care Act. […]