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 […]

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 […]

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

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 […]

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 right now getting […]

by Sandwichman  (re-posted with author’s permission): In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke affirmed, “I do not question but that human knowledge, under the present circumstances of our beings and constitutions, may be carried much farther than it hitherto has been, if men would sincerely, and with freedom of mind, employ all that industry […]

With all the chaff that’s been flying around (recently, and for years now) about saving and investment, dissaving, and lending/borrowing, I felt the need to go back to the numbers and see how they’ve played out over the decades in what we tend to call the “real” economy — domestic households and nonfinancial business. Click […]

MEV will be moving us over to our WordPress platform and new look Tuesday early morning.  They have assured us the glitches have been corrected…rss feeds should continue, and links to old posts will be maintained.  Please let me know right away if problems develop… Dan

Lifted from Robert Waldmann’s Stochastic Thoughts: In the post below, I vigorously criticize IMF staff and Ryan Avent for claiming that central banks adopted low inflation targets in the early 80s without noting that the Fed did not adopt an inflation target until January 25 2012.  I have now read Avent’s post as patiently as […]

by Mike Kimel Reagan and Rios Montt: The Company You Keep Former Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Montt is on trial for genocide. I was born in the US, but my formative years were spent in South America in the 1980s. That the right wing Guatamelan military dictatorship was massacring unarmed civilians on a large scale […]