Today’s release of the Consumer Price Inflation report indicated that, between May and June, the changes in the prices of all the goods and services that consumers typically buy averaged out to exactly zero. Energy prices fell in June, ofsetting slightly higher average prices in non-energy goods. The 12-month inflation rate in core (i.e. excluding […]

The release of the Mid-Session Review of the 2006 budget by the White House today was accompanied by a press release full of dubious claims. Each point in the press release contained its own misleading or incorrect spin on the budget. CLAIM #1: “The Improved Fiscal Outlook Is Directly Tied To The Strength Of The […]

The Bush administration has spent much of the past two days claiming that the tax cuts are responsible for the recent surge in government revenues. But this is nonsense. The fact that government tax collections are rising during a time of economic growth is, at the very least, unsurprising. If the White House wants to […]

While it has been a while, let me start by thanking Kash for his post on the CNOOC bid to buy Unocal as well as his various posts that discuss the benefits of free trade. The NRO has even featured very good defenses of free trade from William Buckley and Bruce Bartlett. I was hoping […]

Part V will be my final post on this for several reasons including the possibility that the rightwing reaction to the news that Karl Rove may indeed be the traitor has reached its pinnacle of dishonesty and hypocrisy. As evidenced by this WSJ editorial, they wish to grant Rove a medal of honor for being […]

Now that denial and the so what approach is not working, phase III is in full motion – the smear Joseph Wilson approach, that is. The AP story included this from Ken Mehlman: Ken Mehlman said Rove was the victim of partisan political attacks by Democrats. Rove “was discouraging a reporter from writing a false […]

Should the Fed continue to raise interest rates? Should they raise them faster? Typically economists presume that the central bank cares about two things when deciding how high interest rates should be: the output gap, which tells us how far the economy is from some notion of “full employment”, and inflation. The Taylor Rule is […]

The recent good news on tax revenues has led to renewed discussions of Laffer’s cocktail napkin. For good rebuttals, see Mark Thoma and Paul Krugman. Of course, Donald Luskin has attempted a rebuttal of Krugman. Luskin cannot deny that tax revenues have fallen so he provides a graph of projected nominal Federal tax revenues where […]

At first, it was denial and then so what. Phase III seems to be blame Joe Wilson by my reading of what John Podhoretz is writing over at NRO’s The Corner: Two years ago Joseph C. Wilson IV had a bio available online in which he mentioned his wife Valerie Plame’s name. The bio has […]

President Bush has an inflated view of the costs of addressing emissions of greenhouse gases. Laurie David reminds us of the costs of doing nothing.