It’s no secret I am a bad economist:  I don’t believe rent control is a bad thing, I consider most of the job-matching models to be ludicrous when someone tries to use them to claim unemployment compensation extends people’s period of unemployment, and I really, really, really don’t believe the equity premium is anything but […]

  The US real trade balance has been bouncing around current level for the last two years –being neither a significant contribution nor a significant drag on  growth.  This is a significantly different picture than the nominal trade balance shows  where the trade deficit is still widening. Much of the apparent stability in the real […]

In a comment to my post yesterday titled “Romney’s VERY Private Equity,” which asked how Romney was able to metasticze his Bain-era IRA account to accumulate more than $100 million—Investment in Apple stock?  In precious-metals funds?  A quiet Louvre heist? I asked—reader Steve Hamlin wrote: Beverly, Re: Romney’s IRA contributions, there was a WSJ article […]

Lifted from Robert’s personal blog comes this thought: Ballance in the Washington Post Again – Robert’s thoughts This is part of a series.  As usual, I think the latest is the all time winner. The concept of Ballance is that reporting and commentary must reach balanced conclusions no matter what the facts are. It is […]

by Tom aka Rusty Rustbelt Health Care Thoughts: Crazy like Foxes? Several governors are announcing they will not begin building the state health exchanges required by PPACA (Obamacare). Some of this is pure partisan, and some a stall until November. Failure to comply will result in the feds installing exchanges in those states. The states […]

by Mike Kimel A Partial Review of Bulls Bears and the Ballot Boxby Bob Deitrick and Lew Goldfarb A couple of years ago, Michael Kanell of the Atlanta Journal Constitution and I wrote Presimetrics. In it, we looked at how Presidents did on a wide range of issues – everything from abortions to the national debt. We measured […]

By now there’s been a lot of discussion in the media about the Vanity Fair and Associated Press exposés of Romney’s and his wife’s offshore bank accounts, to the limited extent that information about them is publicly available.  Romney is now likening overseas bank accounts and shell/money-laundering corporations to investing in real overseas companies—as if […]

by Linda Beale Tax Foundation Misses the Ball (again) in its analysis of Supreme Court Health Care Ruling The Tax Foundation pretends to be non-partisan.  Of course we all know that is pretense.  Look at the way it has pushed its concept of the so-called “tax freedom day”, which misleads everyday Americans into thinking that […]

by Run75441 The Same as MA Healthcare Premiums, the ACA Premiums are too Costly . . . Chicken Little, Courtesy of “EW.Com Entertainment Weekly”I have listened to many  stating the MA subsidies do not go far enough in alleviating the costs of healthcare for a family not covered by an Employer Subsidized Healthcare plan. Even […]