There is a bedtime story of a young boy who put all his eggs into one basket and when that basket fell, all the eggs broke. It is risky to put your eggs into one basket. Investors overcome this risk by diversifying their portfolio. Even the colossal derivatives market is said to lower risk through […]
Today at 11:00 a.m. (EST), join three contributors to the new Foreign Affairs ebook Iran and the Bomb 2: A New Hope—CFR Senior Fellow Elliott Abrams, Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Suzanne Maloney, and Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Vice President George Perkovich—for a discussion about the continuing negotiations between Iran and the P5+1 over Iran’s […]
The Congressional Budget Office has just issued a report on the minimum wage that is a real head-scratcher. Analyzing proposals to raise the minimum wage to $9.00 or $10.10 per hour, it concludes in the latter case that there would be 500,000 fewer jobs in the second half of 2016 than there would be under […]
Most conservatives disparage minimum-wage laws with straightforward economic reasoning, based on Econ 101 textbook theory: demand curves slope down. If you institute a price floor, raising the price of labor, you’ll get less labor demanded — less jobs. This hurts poor people, especially entry-level folks like teenagers. At first blush, the argument’s got legs. And […]
Because we won. Or more precisely I won. Because we are not that much closer to the adoption of the Coberly inspired Northwest Plan than before, despite the fact that similar plans poll spectacularly positive. But mostly all the ‘Reform’ plans for an ‘unsustainable’ Social Security system are running scared from the Senator Warren and […]
Man there is a lot of snow! Australia Smaustralia, California Drought! Heck we had record cold in Buffalo. And ice in ATLANTA!!! So anthropogenic climate change is obviously a myth! (And since Clarence Thomas never saw racism in the 60’s South when he was a boy that is an obvious Lie-Beral myth too) Shorter FAUX […]
Doing my part with Patriotic Millionaires and Smart Capitalists for American Prosperity to promote increasing the minimum wage and indexing it to inflation. Refresh or click the link above if you don’t see the embedded video below. Start around 45:13. Cross-posted at Asymptosis.
Antonio Fatas writes that the central bankers are estimating smaller output gaps in Europe, the UK and the US. I have been saying for a year that potential GDP is far less than the CBO estimate. But other economists have been sticking to the claim that the output gap is still quite large. Economists do […]
Ryan Avent’s excellent post at The Economist finally provides me the impetus to respond to Josh Mason’s comments on my recent post. I suggested: What we have instead of a Global Savings Glut is: 1. A Global Labor Glut: more human effort and ability available than is needed to provide goods that provide high aggregate […]