It all started with an article about a speech by Dallas Fed President, Richard Fisher, in the Business Insider last Friday. Mr. Fisher basically said that wages could start rising once unemployment hits 6.1%. He then said that the Fed should start raising the effective Fed rate earlier than projected. The idea is that the […]
Scott Sumner made a very important point a while back (and repeatedly since) in a post wherein he makes a bunch of other (IMO) not very good points: Income and wealth inequality data: Nonsense on stilts His crucial (and I think true) point, in my words: you can’t think coherently about inequality — especially wealth inequality — if […]
Update appended below. —- After a two-and-a-half-month hiatus from regular blogging here—most of my few posts this summer related to my passion about animal rescue and animal welfare—I’m once again feeling like posting about politics, at least more regularly than I posted this summer. (And maybe soon I’ll once again feel like posting about legal […]
Dan here….The Largest climate march in history is happening today. Jan Galkowski responds to a Wall Street Journal editorial. He requested that comments be written at his website in order to consolidate questions and answers. by Jan Galkowski “It’ll be okay: Trust me”, redux Professor Steven Koonin offers up another dollop of vague, specious criticism of […]
August brings us the annual Irish immigration data, so it’s time to look at what has happened in their statistical reporting “year” that ended in April 2014. While better than last year, it’s still not pretty. According to the Central Statistics Office, net emigration continued in 2013-14, with net emigration of 21,400. a decline of […]
Update appended below. (Second indented quote format also corrected.) —- In the Comments thread to Dan Crawford’s post below titled “Kalamazoo County Michigan…People and Offices to Write to Protest the Stealing of a Home,” I wrote: Dan, you don’t understand. This is freedom, see. I mean, it’s not like it’s the FEDERAL government that’s doing […]
When someone says, “if we raise the minimum wage, there will be more unemployment.” That may be true, but their fear of unemployment is not wise. It is better to say, “if we raise the minimum wage, will net social benefits be increased?” When someone says, “if the Fed had gradually raised the Fed […]
Stephanie Kelton offers the story of government on a macro level that is understandable: The full version of the debate including the Q&A session at the end is available on our YouTube channel.
John Boehner says that unemployed Americans are pretty clearly malingerers, bums on welfare who have decided that they don’t feel like working: “This idea that has been born, maybe out of the economy over the last couple years, that you know, I really don’t have to work. I don’t really want to do this. I think […]
Via the Guardian comes a few words on the drought and markets for, in this case, almonds. But similar things could be said of other crops. The ‘subsidized’ cost of getting water to these producers is not reflected in prices, nor is the ‘ownership’ of the water looked at in a comprehensive manner for sustainability, as […]