LBJ and Senator Green of RI c.NYTby Bruce Webb Now that Grassley and Enzi have shown where the wind was actually blowing on the ‘bi-partisan’ ‘compromise’ supposedly being worked out by the Senate Finance Committee’s Gang of Six it is time to hit the reset button and in the process clear up some confusion. Generally […]
Rebecca Wilder Poland: the bull of eastern and central Europe. While most of central and eastern Europe are either defending exchange rate pegs – this limits the ability to stimulate the economy through monetary policy – and/or running large current account deficits (see chart 2 here), Poland grew a remarkable 1.1% in the second quarter […]
by reader run “Encouraging Veterans to Commit Suicide” Appearing on Fox News “Fox and Friends” in an effort to mislead the elderly, disabled, and veterans; the GOP’s chief spin-meister Michael Steel declares healthcare reform would result in the same bad public policy as shown in a 1997 VA manual encouraging veterans to commit suicide. The […]
Marvel character RevancheHmmmm…guess not. rdan A reader was wondering about our loyal following of “conservative” commenters. That neo-conservatism was not conservativism was suggested in comments to a post on PNAC (Bruce Webb) by a reader objecting to the perceived characterization. Link to interview on NPR with author Sam Tanenhaus. In his latest book, The Death […]
Ken Houghton notes that the first thing anyone learns from Pietra Rivoli’s The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy: An Economist Examines the Markets, Power, and Politics of World Trade is how pernicious the U.S. subsidy of its cotton industry is.* Now the WTO has discovered the obvious: American goods will face [$294.7] […]
Robert Waldmann Joe Strawman argues that the solution to global warming is clean coal technology and in particular sequestering C02 from exhaust from coal fired power plants. Therefore cap and trade is a bad policy, because technology will solve anything soon. In fact, if “clean coal” is not a contradiction in terms, the case for […]
by Bruce Webb Big Banks Repay: 15% interest earned The profits, collected from eight of the biggest banks that have fully repaid their obligations to the government, come to about $4 billion, or the equivalent of about 15 percent annually, according to calculations compiled for The New York Times. These early returns are by no […]
by reader Aunt Deb On Friday, Aug. 28, the Washington Post printed two op-ed pieces on healthcare reform; “Obamacare: The Only Exit Strategy, by Charles Krauthammer and “Change We’d Rather Do Without” by Michael Kinsley. Neither piece discussed real details of either the existing funding and delivery system for health care or the possible ways […]
Robert Waldmann Polling results are absolutely clear. Now and for the decades a clear majority of US residents support taking from the rich and … well it doesn’t much matter what. Republicans often argue that this or that would be “class warfare” leading to the guess that they might have some reason to believe that […]
Robert Waldmann is a bit irritated with [many] US senior citizens. They want to keep the hands of the government off their medicare.* I don’t want to think what would happen if the government meddled with their social security pensions. Most US senior citizens are acting as egoistical hypocrites. I would like to offer them […]