by cactus Taxes and the Private Sector, Part 2: Would You Like Some Lags with That?This post follows up last week’s look at how taxes on the private sector affect growth in the private sector. In that post, the data simply refused to cough up anything that could be construed as an excuse for someone […]

by Bruce Webb In the course of an exchange between me and a fellow Bear, the question arose if social spending had a crowding out effect on other social spending. In particular if we have a small problem in Social Security and a big problem in providing health care would solving the first problem put […]

Rdan No Sweat adds another facet to the crisis in Dubai…mobility of labor and wages. I cannot imagine what conditions are like to produce a strike in this city. If the players default in high finance, do they go to debtors’ prison like most everyone else? An estimated 700,000 Asians, mostly from India, Pakistan and […]

Robert Waldmann Among experts, there is a widespread view that people in the USA support social insurance an oppose welfare. It is a fact that they support social security old age and disability pensions and hated AFDC. It is suspected that describing social security as a pension plan with mandatory participation is part of the […]

We are now almost 24 months into the Great Recession. While many expect NBER will eventually say that The Great Recession ended several months ago, they have not yet. By contrast, the recession that began The Great Depression, per NBER, lasted 43 months. It seems only fair to compare the two, so I trust I […]

Richard Baldwin at VoxEU introduces a new book on “great trade collapse” before the WTO meeting occurring shortly. Re-posted with attribution: The Great Trade Collapse World trade experienced a sudden, severe and synchronised collapse in late 2008 – the sharpest in recorded history and deepest since WWII. VoxEU today posts a new Ebook – written […]

Have a good Thanksgiving folks. From all the Bears

Today’s release by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas of October’s Trimmed Mean Personal Consumption Expenditure gives us a chance to check this “alternative measure of core inflation.” The clearest thing is that it does what the FRB Dallas intends: generally reduces the measure of inflation: For the graphic above, any value above the line […]