Robert Waldmann The www.washington.com Headline and abstract person has outdone himself or herself writing CBO sees debt estimates soar Analysts say health law has not improved budget and Obama’s tax agenda will make things worse. Lori Montgomery As Kevin Drum says always click the link. Lori Montgomery actually wrote President Obama’s overhaul of the health-care […]

Robert Waldmann Nick Rowe asks a very interesting question. After the jump I attempt an answer Please read Rowe’s post first. The following will make no sense at all if you don’t (note reading Rowe’s post is a necessary not a sufficient condition for it to make sense). The short explanation is that Rowe finds […]

Robert Waldmann Those of us who fear global warming want to make it more expensive to burn coal. One way to do this is to impose absurdly high wages and restrictive work rules on coal mines. We know how to drive prices up. It is easy. Militant unions have shown the way. I propose the […]

Robert Waldmann Ezra Klein shows a graph and writes What you’re seeing there [will see if you click this link] is a projection for how our energy usage would change after 20 years of a Waxman-Markey-like cap-and-trade bill. As you can see, transportation — which is probably what most Americans think would be affected — […]

It appears that someone (who I am sure has family income under $250,000 per year and is just interested in social science) contests my view that families with income over $250,000 per year are rich. He or she notes that two earner families can be rich by working real hard and that price levels are […]

Robert Waldmann Jeff Sachs proposed higher taxes on the rich.Felix Salmon wrote I don’t think this is possible, politically, in either the US or the UK. In the US, the middle classes are implacably opposed to tax hikes on people making more money than they themselves will ever make. Kevin Drum agrees with Salmon about […]

Robert Waldmann I completely missed this. From the final House Bill, click through (I can’t direct link) or find in the pdf “SEC. 6009. REMOVAL OF STATUTORY REFERENCES TO CREDIT RATINGS.” This removes the references to NRSRO from federal agencies and the law. The LeMieux amendment is the language of SEC. 6009 from the House […]

Robert Waldmann is commenting on a comment at Mark Thoma’s blog. The comment NotMarkT ha detto… One of the difficulties with model selection for assessing tail probabilities is that the empirical data often can’t distinguish among light (e.g., normal) or heavy tailed (e.g., pareto) distributions. The model selection problem then becomes a question of optimism […]

Robert Waldmann As he watches policy makers cry “fire fire” in Noah’s flood, Paul Krugman becomes almost shrill. He has a simple (rigorous) model which suggests more stimulus would be ideal and that, when in a liquidity trap, government spending should be set to give unemployment equal to the non accelerating rate of unemployment. In […]

Robert Waldmann Over at Firedoglake “Masaccio” has a very interesting report on a legal complaint by the estate of Lehman Brothers against J.P. Morgan. on September 9, 2008, JPMorgan insisted that Lehman sign further agreements, under which Lehman guaranteed all obligations of its subsidiaries, including obligations under derivatives, and lost the ability to access its […]