by Beverly Mannfrom The Annarborist A Scalia Tea Leaf on the Healthcare Law? Judicial decisions, like the Constitution itself, are nothing more than “parchment barriers,” 5 Writings of James Madison 269, 272 (G. Hunt ed. 1901). Both depend on a judicial culture that understands its constitutionally assigned role, has the courage to persist in that […]
guest post by Ilsm According to GAO 11-394T 17 Feb 2011 , DoD Major Weapons Acquisition continues to be a high risk item watched by GAO. In the testimony the GAO is concerned about waste and mismanagement in the 102 largest DoD acquisition programs. The testimony states that in the five years starting in 2011 […]
AB, late Thursday: If you want to stop a dictator from killing his people, freeze any of his personal assets that are held out of the country. In cases where the dictator is likely to fall, it sends a clear signal to other countries. (In cases where the dictator is likely to succeed, the worst […]
Jonathan Zasloff asks at The Reality-based Community blog New Directions in GOP Political Economy Quite subtle, actually: Public-sector collective bargaining is unhealthy and distorts democracy because it enables workers to influence the government which negotiates with them; but Unlimited and secret corporate political campaign contributions are necessary to democracy because they enable corporations to influence […]
The global inflation picture is heating up. On Google, a search of ‘inflation’ spanning the month of February 2011 gets 311,000,000. For one year ago, the same search parameters yielded 1,850,000 hits. Inflation’s on the monetary policy makers’ minds. But why? In the developed world, it’s a food and energy story! Seriously, look at German […]
Some catching up on health care reform progress makes sense as we keep in mind these posts from Beat the Press Dean Baker writes: Second, the story of massive huge future budget deficits has little to do with aging. It is a story of a broken private health care system. If the United States paid […]
By Noni Mausa Wiggle Room In a claustrophobic economy where the lions share of the fruit of citizens’ efforts is funneled to a small number of beneficiaries, where institutions intended to intervene on their behalf have been rejigged to work backwards, what can the little guy do to gain some wiggle room? The poorest Americans […]
First I would like to stress again that I have great respect of Janet Yellen. I try to only critize people whom I respect (my posts show just how respectful I am in general). So this comment on her use of event studies is really a comment on event studies and not on Yellen in […]
Peter Dorman at Econospeak, who is smarter and nicer than I am,* boils down the question: [D]o you believe that managers normally make the right decisions over how to run organizations? If you believe that premise, please explain: Why all those great managers of the late 1940s through the mid-1970s ran defined benefit contribution plans, […]
by Mike Kimel Another Look at Keynesianism and the Great Stagnation Cross-posted at the Presimetrics blog Last week I had a post noting that the US government followed more or less naive Keynesian policies (whether on purpose or not I cannot say) from the early 1930s to the late 1960s. The post also notes that […]