by Linda Beale Lew almost official as nominee for Treasury Secretary Media headlines continue to tout Obama’s white male choices for rounding out his ‘new’ cabinet. Latest to the list is that he has offered his Jacob Lew, his current White House Chief of Staff, the post of Treasury Secretary. See, e.g., Obama to tap […]
From an interview at Real News with Patrick Bond (the Director of the Center for Civil Society and Professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa): And the idea is that if you value the environment, you should put a price tag on it so that its destruction is not just a [free] activity—so […]
by Mike Kimel Why Much of the Population Thinks Economists are Charlatans Noah Smith asks why people think economists are charlatans. He concludes it has something to do with trade. I submit the answer is much, much simpler, and I think it deals with the part of economics which has most visibility with the public: macroeconomics. Read this post from […]
From a website called Daily Writ today, in a post called “Likelihood of a Petition Being Granted”: There are a lot of numbers thrown out about the likelihood of a cert. petition being granted. The number I’ve always heard is 1%, but I sometimes hear numbers as high as 5%. According to statistics from the […]
Gavin Kennedy reminds us that handy metaphors used to sell fictions about either free markets or ‘the force’ at work are just that: Smith is a conjecture about the virtues of a free-market economy”, is so absurd as to be embarrassing. That Adam Smith favoured “a free market economy” is approximately correct. That he asserted that a […]
[I]sn’t it paramount the president explain to the public what the debt ceiling issue actually is, rather than allowing the Republicans to keep misinforming the public that it’s an increase in budget allocations rather than a payment for budget allocations already made? This quirk in the law–the requirement that Congress authorize payment of costs already […]
Think Progress offers a note of caution when we think we have reality nailed for government spending and results. And how ‘public displays’ by our politicians offer up little information: During the 2012 fiscal year, the federal government spent more on immigration enforcement — $18 billion — than on every other federal law enforcement agencies […]
This shift from wages to profits is called redistribution. It is the central fact of American economic life. And it is the primary reason that economic inequality in the United States has skyrocketed. Yet wages, which are descending, are taxed at a higher rate than income derived from corporate profits — capital gains and dividends. […]
While not a macro issue, there is room for thought. Via The Weaker Party blog comes this tidbit on specific inflation indicators from The Dailey Beast:
by run75411 Update: Besides not prosecuting particulars who promulgated much of 2008, what makes this settlement bad is letting banks off the hook: “In the settlement announced Monday between the Federal Reserve, the Comptroller of the Currency and ten of the largest banks and other mortgage providers, the government gives up the right to prosecute banks […]