It’s nice to see Matthew Yglesias embracing Modern Monetary Theory, but I wonder if he totally gets it: The point of collecting taxes isn’t that the government needs money (it can print money) it’s that if the quantity of taxes is too low relative to the stock of money, then the money loses its value […]

Middle Class Political Economist: Basics: Length of Unemployment is Worst Since World War II.. (HT Brad DeLong.) The key graph: Assuming the economy is “trying” to reach equilibrium, this suggests that it “wants” less workers. If that is a secular trend, as suggested by the steadily lengthening jobless recessions since the 80s, …we’re faced with […]

I caught a bit of Jennifer Granholm’s The War Room for 2/23/12.  She was talking gasoline prices and had Ron Klain on for his ideas. He is a past chief of staff for Gore and Biden as VP’s. Mr. Klain also published his thought at Bloomberg2/20/12. This post is not about solving the rising gasoline […]

Steven Rattner, the lead adviser on the Obama administration’s auto task force in 2009, has an op-ed titled “Delusions About the Detroit Bailout” in today’s New York Times.   Some highlights: As a presidential aspirant, Mr. Romney evidently hasn’t felt a need to be consistent or specific as to what should have been done to address […]

By Linda Beale Romney’s association with corporate tax shelter schemes Bloomberg’s Jesse Drucker has been doing some research into presidential candidate Mitt Romney and come up with some interesting information–at least for those of us who find corporate involvement in aggressive tax shelter phantom loss generating schemes a worrisome problem. See Drucker, Romney as Audit […]

In private communication, Roger Chittum got me thinking about the vehicle component of gasoline consumption. I’m going focus on the gross vehicle numbers, and not get too deeply into the car/truck/SUV product mix detail.   Data is from the Department of Energy TRANSPORTATION ENERGY DATA BOOK: EDITION 30—2011.   (Warning:  414 page pdf.) According to Table 3-5 […]

Not to borrow a page from Brad DeLong, but three days before the singer’s would-have-been-80th birthday and 67 years to the day after the events that made his subject famous…

Greg Sargent, whose Gatekeeper Job at Kaplan Prep Daily makes him somewhat important in determining the results of elections, cast a pale over my good mood about my dinner bet with Lance Mannion this morning:* Having trouble getting outraged with Romney campaign sending out only good parts of Det[roit] News endorsement. Seems like par for […]

Today’s Page 1, above-the-fold, biggest type headlines for the FT: US PDF edition: “Obama proposes corporate tax rate cut: System ‘outdated, unfair, and inefficient’ US Print edition: “Obama and Romney unveil rival tax plans: Proposals show strong support for reforms” The latter piece waits until the 7th graf to Tell the Truth and Shame the […]