Kenneth Thomas has covered how many state level deals to entice private companies are bad deals, including sports stadiums, as ‘job creators’ extol their own virtues. Run has covered the defunding of state unviversities and also the rise in tuition and student debt. Robert Waldmann writes about the constant ballance of reporting. Yves Smith has […]
Via Truthout comes this post on the US Post Office: The post office makes a profit — expected to be more than a billion dollars this year. Yet, the media keeps reporting that the USPS is losing billions of dollars each year. What they fail to mention is that those are phony paper losses manufactured […]
Does the name Bruce Rauner ring a bell? No, me neither. It turns out he’s the Republican nominee for governor in Illinois, which under normal circumstances would mean he’s a nobody. But he’s been leading incumbent Democrat Pat Quinn in polls all summer, and could actually end up as the state’s next governor. This is […]
In 1998, the gov made it impossible to discharge federal student loans through bankruptcy except upon death, disability, or public service. The gov did provide certain measures to change payments then such as forbearance, economic forbearance (no interest for 3 years), and payment change. In 2005 private student loan originators lobbied to have the same […]
by Dale Coberly CRFB Analysis of the 2014 Trustees Report A reply by me a reply to me and agreement? The Committee for a Responsible Budget (CRFB) published what they called an analysis of the 2014 Trustees Report. I read it and was at first disappointed that it seemed to be the same old attack […]
Matt Bruenig gives us a great breakdown of what poverty would look like if we relied on the market to solve it (as we did almost exclusively for thousands of years before the emergence of enlightened modern welfare states over the last two centuries). The poverty rate among the elderly would be > 45%. (Old […]
Years of >5% Growth: Pre-Reagan? 15 Post-Reagan? 5 Post-80s-recession-recovery? 2 Cross-posted at Asymptosis.
Big tobacco companies and the medical establishments: Today, Big Tobacco is chasing a new revenue stream: e-cigarettes. They appeal to 20-somethings-and the lack of health studies about the side effects give the old merchants of death an unhealthy horizon for false advertising and profits that come at a cost of misery. And lawsuits…but not for […]
ProGrowthLiberal in his comments on my last post and in his own post at EconoSpeak highlights the fact that drug-maker AbbVie already makes most of its profits outside the United States, about 87% in fact over 2011-2013 by his calculation. For PGL, then, AbbVie is not the best example of an inversion because the horse […]
David Cay Johnston emailed me that there were errors in Forbes contributor Tim Worstall’s recent criticisms of the linked article. Indeed there are, but the biggest one (or at least the funniest one) isn’t the one Johnston pointed me to. Worstall writes that AbbVie’s pending inversion will not, by itself, reduce the taxes the company […]