Is Bitcoin Really Real Money? Ontological and Epistemological Questions The movement to make Bitcoin into a de facto form of money has taken a step forward when Elon Musk declared that he would be purchasing over a billion btc. Some are claiming that Musk did this to pump up an alternative asset because Tesla stock […]
From the WAPO: Despite her outward signs of success, Ryan had struggled financially for years. She was still paying off a $37,000 lien for unpaid federal taxes when she was arrested. She’d nearly lost her home to foreclosure before that. She filed for bankruptcy in 2012 and faced another IRS tax lien in 2010. Nearly […]
Let’s discuss something worth getting really excited about, the Biden/Romney child tax credit/child allowance proposals. These proposals would make life much better for poor children and their parents. A lot better. Neither proposal goes as far as I would like, but they would be a real improvement and could be made more generous over time. […]
Today Tyler Cowen posted this: Remember the proposals for a $15 federal minimum wage? Employment would be reduced by 1.4 million workers, or 0.9 percent, according to CBO’s average estimate… That is from the new CBO report. Here is a bit more context: In an average week in 2025, the year when the minimum wage would […]
Boston College History Professor Heather Cox Richardson continues her dialogue “Letters from an American” with coverage of events leading up to the Senate trial of a former president and the passage of a much needed economic rescue of the nation’s citizens caught up in an epidemic. “Historians are fond of saying that the past doesn’t […]
Kevin Quinn at Econospeak has an interesting conversation on how the Biden proposed stimulus will play out. “Summers and Ricardo”
Larry Summers has responded to his critics. My first thought is, yes he is still really smart. Also Olivier Blanchard also thinks the Covid Relief bill is too generous, and, in particular objects to the $1400 for most Americans. Note that Blanchard is the author of the main citation in my critique of Summers (although […]
It seems that many people have concerns about Larry Summers’s concerns about overdoing the Covid 19 Relief bill. My first reaction to his op-ed is here, but I realize that I had more nearly relevant things to say in the Debt and Taxes series and, in particular in debt and taxes I and debt and […]
January 2021 jobs report: a strong divergence between very weak job gains, but a big drop in unemployment; but the only critical number is the doses of vaccine administered For the past several weeks, based on the increase in initial jobless claims, I have warned that the December employment report might have a negative number, […]
Early this morning the Senate passed a budget resolution telling committees to spend an additional $ 1.9 T on Covid relief. Yesterday, Larry Summers wrote an op-ed expressing concerns about the imminent resolution. Like many many many people, I disagree in part. Oddly, I think I disagree less strongly with Summers than most US adults […]