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 […]

by Bruce Webb Conservatives have long been 2nd Amendment Absolutists (unless you are a black man carrying a stick outside a mostly black precinct in Philadelphia, somehow ‘open carry’ doesn’t apply there). Now they have doubled down with the Tenther Movement, which they have tied together with an Enumerated Powers doctrine which mostly doesn’t actually […]

Update: Brad DeLong looks at the data and suggests that the problem may be that the current President is as innumerate as the previous one. Mark Thoma quotes James Kwak: So no, I don’t think Obama is abandoning his principles for political advantage; I think these are his principles. And while I’m upset at him, […]

What Treasury under Geither does, according to the Washington Post: “I think we are known as the front line,” said [Michael] Pedroni, 38, a former International Monetary Fund economist and Federal Reserve Bank of New York employee who has spent time at a Wall Street research firm. “Our analysis is meant to be very candid, […]

This post caught my attention, and worth holding in mind as regulation develops. After several weeks of officially pleasant interactions, signs are emerging that the Treasury Department’s knives may be coming out against Elizabeth Warren. In recent weeks, Treasury officials have leaked details about Warren to Politico as part of what appears to be an […]