Mark Thoma joins Dr. Black, putting him one-up on some Liberal Bloggers Who Should Know Better.* Thoma: 1. You have to make the Republicans pay in terms of eroded public support before they will agree to cooperate at all. The president in particular has not played a long-run strategy, the Republicans have, and the results […]

I’m not going to do this with graphics (at least for now), but the finger exercise seems intuitive. Assume—against all evidence—that the “once we educated them, 30% said they would stop offering health insurance to their lowest-paid employees” study is accurate. How does that, as John Boehner declares, cost America jobs? From Boehner’s site: At […]

For Mother’s Day, as it were, xkcd presents The Lawrence H. Summers Memorial History of Math and Science. Buce at Underbelly does this, probably saving me the trouble of a post. (Consider this a SlothBear moment.) The problem I want Drek the Uninteresting—or anyone else who knows the research—to address: if we assume that mercury […]

AB, late Thursday: If you want to stop a dictator from killing his people, freeze any of his personal assets that are held out of the country. In cases where the dictator is likely to fall, it sends a clear signal to other countries. (In cases where the dictator is likely to succeed, the worst […]

In the context of Dan’s post below, I just want to repeat what Bruce Bartlett said so accurately yesterday: [H]ere’s what I would be doing if I were organizing opposition to the Republican budgetary disinformation campaign. First of all, I would be holding hearings five days a week in the Senate Appropriations Committee and every […]

Reposted from New Deal 2.0 with permission from author. Deficit Hawks Down: The Misconstrued “Facts” Behind Their Hype by James K. Galbraith Economist James K. Galbraith attends a Pete Peterson-funded road show. The Fiscal Solutions Tour is the latest Peter G. Peterson Foundation effort to rouse the public against deficits and the national debt — […]

If all goes well—and so far, it has gone much better than expected—from to Salaam.

This story should be a lot better known than it is. That, and that Blumlein is too nice a person, because it’s the 1986 Tax Reorganization that destroyed the future.

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. […]

One of the best rules in mathematics is that, to determine the value of all the variables, you need only as many distinct equations as you have variables. (previous sentence edited for clarity.) So let’s combine a couple of recent articles (h/t Mark Thoma for the first, Digby for the second.) Richard Florida finds three […]