by New deal democrat at Bondadd blog on Monday morning: A thought for Sunday: the new 3/5’s Rule and plight of the DREAMers The 3/5’s rule was one of the ugly compromises that had to be made in order to bring the slave-owning South into the Federal republic under the Constitution.  It stated: Representatives and […]

I thought it worthwhile to re-post this quote from a time before the Tea Party even thought of being as a reminder that the current struggle between the Republican ‘Establishment’ and the Tea Party has nothing to do with the former being some remnant of the 50s-60s era of mainstream Republicans being the ‘Goo-Goo’ Party. […]

There are what I perceived as problems with the Brookings Study. Just one example: they base much of their analyses upon “lifetime earnings associated with earning a bachelor’s degree”. The average lifetimes earnings of degree holders is certainly skewed significantly upwards by the top 10% of earners (who account for over 40% of all earnings, […]

Unemployment dropped to 6.1% in June and down to 6.2% for the 2nd quarter. Unemployment is dropping faster than many economists expected. I would explain the fast drop as a reaction by firms to maintain their profit rates as labor share and productivity are both stationary now. The recent drops in unemployment are evidence that […]

From Center for Economic and Policy Development comes this framing….Global Warming and the Which Way Is Up Problem in Economic Print It is painful to read Eduardo Porter’s column on the prospects for slowing global warming and China’s greenhouse gas emissions. It’s not that Porter got anything in particular wrong; he is presenting standard projections […]

by Sandwichman at Econospeak  (reposted with permission from the author)   Supply Creates Its Own Demon II: You Don’t, Say! Karl Marx could hardly bring himself to utter the name of J. B. Say without affixing to it some contemptuous description or sarcastic remark: “Say’s earth-shaking discovery…” “…adopted by Ricardo from the tedious Say (and […]

From the NYT comes this quick look at the vaccination issues you might have heard about in the news…Vaccine Costs Soaring and Paying till it hurts… Vaccination prices have gone from single digits to sometimes triple digits in the last two decades, creating dilemmas for doctors and their patients as well as straining public health […]

Update to the Hobby Lobby decision comes as a result of a SCOTUS injunction the day before the 4th of July 2014 The nonprofit Wheaton College filed a petition to keep it from having to a file self-certification document certifying it is a religious organization and should be exempt from having to provide contraceptives. Sotomayer […]

Austerity by governments is a policy to reduce budget deficits by cutting spending and/or raising taxes. Basically governments withhold money from the economy. The result is that aggregate demand is reduced. Yet, there is another form of austerity where businesses lower pay to labor. In effect, businesses withhold money from the economy by reducing pay […]

As we will show, Congress provided protection for people like the Hahns and Greens by employing a familiar legal fiction: It included corporations within RFRA’s definition of “persons.” But it is important to keep in mind that the purpose of this fiction is to provide protection for human beings. A corporation is simply a form […]