Bruce Bartlett and Brad DeLong note that even the Washington Times is challenging the credibility of our Treasury Secretary: According to Mr. Snow’s own numbers, which Mr. Frank had to drag out of him, over the past 12 months average nominal wages, for production and nonsupervisory employees, who account for 80 percent of private-sector employment, […]
Mark Thoma shared with me in an email some very odd rant from Jan Larson: The third in a potentially never-ending “liberals are” generalization series focuses on how liberals are economically ignorant … Liberals don’t understand economics, but that doesn’t stop them from following a “liberal economic theory.” This theory is fallacious in its assumptions […]
Mark Thoma provides a working link to and comments on a 2004 paper by William A. Niskanen and Peter Van Doren: The first conclusion from these tests is that there was no significant effect on the relative level of federal spending … The more important conclusion, consistent with my prior estimate of this equation, is […]
Perhaps macroeconomic professors should assign the latest from Cesar Conda & Ernest S. Christian (C&C) as reading material with an attached essay question designed to let their students find the various flaws in the argument: The recipe for high GDP growth in the future is the same as it was in 2003-04, when the combination […]
Mark Thoma has started an interesting discussion beginning with a Q&A with Paul Krugman: Alan Gertler, Reno, Nev.: I’m a scientist, not an economist, so I’m fairly naive when it comes to what drives the economy. My question is this: Have the tax cuts stimulated the economy as claimed (which I don’t believe given the […]
That didn’t take long. When William Niskanen produced a regression that suggested years in which taxes were low also tended to be years in which spending was high, one had to expect that the National Review would have some comment: While Niskanen has accounted for the effects of the business cycle, he has not taken […]
Alan Greenspan makes an important point: NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — Former Fed chief Alan Greenspan sent a message to Washington policymakers: Don’t think about naming him to another commission seeking to untie the Gordian knot of Social Security reform. …Greenspan warned that retirement health-care costs are more of a problem for the federal government than […]
Kash’s post on the latest consumer price inflation news allows us to raise a couple of additional points. Our first graph provides the latest on real wages for production or nonsupervisory workers, which have generally been declining over the past two years as nominal wage increases have not kept pace with consumer price inflation. While […]
I’ve taken the liberty of composing a picture that addresses the implausible notion that the Federal government’s budget deficits are the result of “ungoverned forces”. The graph below shows the on-budget federal budget balance – that is, the budget balance excluding the Social Security Trust Fund surplus – and the ways in which various deliberate […]
While Mark Thoma has a few words about the partisan garbage Karl Rove delivered to the American Enterprise Institute, let me start here: The economy itself began slowing in the third quarter of 2000 as GDP declined by an annual rate of 0.5 percent. And all of this took place before George W. Bush set […]