Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

Clinton Global Initiative, Day 2 – Empowering Girls and Women (Plenary)

Moderator is Katie Couric, News Anchor and Managing Editor at CBS News. Panelists are Her Majesty Queen Rania Al Abdullah , Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, President of the Republic of Liberia Muhtar Kent, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, The Coca-Cola Company Mr. Kent’s favorite book is Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat. […]

Clinton Global Initiative – Economic Empowerment (Lunch Session)

(Joined in progress) Governor Jennifer Granholm of Michigan Michigan – “No Worker Left Behind,” which provides retraining for those downsized auto workers and others. Escalation of high school curriculum so that graduating students must have taken college prep courses—has resulted in reduction in dropout rate because the community understands that this is a good thing […]

Clinton Global Initiative, Day 2 – Plenary Session

The second day of the conference, and the first full of the Initiative, is devoted primarily to E&E. Random notes: President Clinton noted in his opening statement that the Haitian disaster’s immediate effect was to eliminate (kill) 17% of the Haitian workforce. Melinda Gates notes that her efforts are mostly aligned with MDG #4, but […]

there’s a simple way to curb borrowing: Let the tax cuts expire for everyone

Lori Montgomery in the Washington Post Fearing a soaring deficit, many analysts favor letting Bush tax cuts expire makes a slip in thought or typing, but I wonder if a lot of people might also use this shorthand sort of thinking in the tax cuts raise revenue tradition: …many economists and budget analysts say there’s […]

A cut in payroll taxes? Heck no.

Prof Barkley Rosser expresses irritation with suggestions of pay roll cuts as stimulus: In yesterday’s WaPo, accessible as one of Mark Thoma’s general links, http://www.economistsview.typepad.com , Nouriel Roubini sounded very reasonable for anyone addressing the utterly corrupt and degraded “catfish” deficit commission soldouts. He proposed a cut in payroll taxes, to be made revenue neutral […]

Corporate Tax Rates and Unemployment, A Correction

by Mike Kimel Corporate Tax Rates and Unemployment, A Correction Cross posted at the Presimetrics blog. — I’m embarrassed. I messed up last week’s post which appeared at Angry Bear and on the Presimetrics blog. Essentially, I copied in some of the data on tax rates incorrect for three years in the late 1970s; the […]

House Generic Ballot

Robert Waldmann Something odd seems to be happening in US public opinion. Pollsters are shifting from polls of registered voters to polls of likely voters. Given demographics and the enthusiasm gap, I expected the Republican lead in the House generic ballot to increase. Until recently, that seemed to be happening right on schedule. Since then […]

A Conversation with George Soros

With thanks to Felix Salmon for arranging the invitation. There’s an episode of House where he has to get rid of one of the people for his new team.  By the end of the episode, the sharpest person in the group has said everything that we would have expected to hear from House—and is therefore […]

Current doldrums are just jobless, sales-less recovery

NBER just made official what we all knew they would say: the Great Recession ended in June of 2009. For those who are encouraged, note that they also do not indicate that there was a recession from March of 1933 to May of 1937, that the eighteen (18) months indicated is the longest since 1929-1933, […]

Social Security benefits and maximum contribution base

originally posted at Calculated Riskre-posted with permission from the author Dan here…there might be a lot of noise about no increase due to cost of living adjustment (cola), but here is part one of three excellent posts on why it works this way for no inflation: Update: Updated links and formatting made 3:00 PM. Calculated […]