Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

Old and new feedburner subscriptions…are they working now for you?

MEV has written that this should be happening for our subscribers: Feedburner issue: You currently have 2 different feeds setup through feedburner. We created a redirect for the old feedburner URL to the new one and all RSS feeds should be working properly at this point. •All old subscribers will be redirected to the newer […]

Empirical Methods and Progress in Macroeconomics

Mark Thoma, among many others, discusses some implications for readers to consider for macro overall: Empirical Methods and Progress in Macroeconomics (Quote)The blow-up over the Reinhart-Rogoff results reminds me of a point I’ve been meaning to make about our ability to use empirical methods to make progress in macroeconomics. This isn’t about the computational mistakes that Reinhart […]

Migrated

Hi folks….let me know if there are problems with your feeds or old links. And also if you find our new format easier to read and what functions we might add once we settle down into our new functioning environment.

Marathon

I posted all I can say publicly at Skippy. And even that wouldn’t work at a family blog like this one. The rest are jokes that I am told–undoubtedly correctly, but lapsed traders are difficult to retrain*–are “too soon.” The Phantom Scribbler came out of her retirement (first post in more than eleven months), though, […]

Farm subsidies and entrenched wealth

Lynne Kiesling writes Farm subsidies and entrenched wealth at Knowledge Problem: Veronique de Rugy has a great argument for ending farm subsidies in the April issue of Reason (and yes, do read the whole thing, well worth your time). Farm subsidies are the canonical example of the dynamics of Mancur Olson’s Logic of Collective Action […]

Okay Fine, Let’s Call Investment “Saving.” Or…Not

I really like Hellestal’s comment and linguistic take on this whole business: I’m comfortable changing my language in order to communicate. I have very little patience for people who aren’t similarly capable of changing their definitions. This discussion is really about the words we use to describe different accounting constructs. Nick totally gets that as […]

Doggett fighting for fairness on Tax Day!

by Linda Beale Doggett fighting for fairness on Tax Day! On Monday, Congressman Lloyd Doggett, a long-time member of the House Ways and Means Committee, releases a GAO report showing the continued advance of corporate tax expenditures that allow corporations to pay little or no taxes year after year. “Of the many Americans who are […]

Boston Marathon bombing

My son has been called in where he works in Boston for triage of injuries . My thoughts and prayers go to the injured.   I and family were there just yesterday. Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Wow. Seriously, Chris Cillizza and Sean Sullivan? Seriously??

Am I misunderstanding (certainly a possibility), or do the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza and Sean Sullivan write an entire article based on a really obviously ridiculous conflation of two separate concepts: what tax law is, and what tax law should be? The article, titled “Mitt Romney was right (on taxes),” chastises the public for hypocrisy […]