Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

Video series for “Rethinking Investment Incentives”

Video series for “Rethinking Investment Incentives” As regular readers will recall, I contributed to the Columbia Center for Sustainable Investment’s book, Rethinking Investment Incentives: Trends and Policy Options (Columbia University Press, 2016). Now, the editors have put together a series of video teasers for most of the individual chapters, all of which can be seen […]

May industrial production: no change in trend

May industrial production: no change in trend This was a post I meant to put up Friday, but was pre-empted by the important housing news. May industrial production came in unchanged. But that didn’t stop Doomers, who had been silent about April’s big increase in manufacturing, from trumpeting its 0.4% decline (go ahead, just try […]

The Hidden Cost of Privatization

The Hidden Cost of Privatization by Nina Shapiro at Institute for New Economic Thinking  is an excellent read. This conception of government, of course, is not new. “Small government” has been a hallmark of the Republican Party for decades, and the privatization of government properties and services has been increasing worldwide since the 1980s. In the […]

Is Trump’s Apprenticeship Program Like His Infrastructure Program?

Is Trump’s Apprenticeship Program Like His Infrastructure Program? It looks like it might be in a crucial way.  Both involve lots of rhetoric about expanding programs that many support, apprenticeships and infrastructure.  However, on looking at them closer to the extent we can see anything specific aside from the rhetoric, it looks like they involve […]

Retail sales disappoint — but don’t hyperventilate about it

Retail sales disappoint — but don’t hyperventilate about it There certainly is a  lot of information to unpack from this morning’s retail sales and inflation reports, and what they mean for wages and jobs.  I’ll address them in separate posts. First, retail sales.  They certainly were a disappointment, coming in at -0.3% nominally and -0.2% […]

Kansas Republicans abandon Brownback; raise taxes over his veto

Kansas Republicans abandon Brownback; raise taxes over his veto Remember Kansas’s great tax-cutting experiment under Governor Sam Brownback? (Me, sarcastic?) As always in Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore La-La Land, cutting taxes leads to economic nirvana. Except when it doesn’t, and it didn’t in Kansas. I recently wrote about the idiocy of Investor Business Daily‘s […]