I am aware of the internet tradition called the 27% Crazification Factor which is undead and well But can we get a solid lower bound on the sane (OK really well informed) factor ?  For example, there was the February 2010  New York Times CBS News poll in which 12% of respondents correctly noted that Obama […]

Matt Yglesias, servitor to our corporate overlords, suggests that the reduced capital gains tax rate paid by rentiers like Willard Romney is really a very, very good thing.  To wit: The main reason Romney’s effective rate is so low is that the American tax code contains a lot of preferences for investment income over labor […]

What kind of econotroll are you ? This is a must read.  I honestly did laugh out loud.

Romney’s plan to find a cure for cancer: A bullet point saying “I’ll find a cure for cancer.” Voila!  Elect Romney. 

The always-brilliant J. W. Mason’s response to what in my opinion is a quite befuddled Mike Beggs review in Jacobin of David Graeber’s Debt: The First Five Thousand Years prompts me to tackle a subject that I’ve been worrying at for a long time: Money. I’ve been worrying at it despite (or because of) endless […]

Jared Bernstein tells us yet again what the data has been telling us forever (my bold): I agree with Chye-Ching Huang, who agrees with the Congressional Research Service, Len Burman, and me: over the long, historical record of special tax treatment for investment incomes and tax cuts to the top marginal tax rates, one simply […]

by Kenneth Thomas Every State’s State/Local Tax System Taxes the Poor More than the Wealthy–And All Exceed Federal Taxes A new report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) shows that in every state in the country, the bottom 20% of households pay more of their income in state and local taxes than […]

Bill McBride at Calculated Risk does his usual excellent job of reporting economic data; He just reported the state unemployment rates and published a chart comparing the current rate with each state’s peak rate. One very significant point that popps up in this chart is that Michigan and Ohio appear to have had the greatest […]

Rachel Zubay, 32, works as a waitress at Abdalla’s Steak House, in the shadow of a recently idled coal-fired power plant. She’s got two kids, is in the middle of a divorce, has no medical insurance and is paying $50 a month on a $15,000 surgical bill after she injured her ankle and foot in […]