From Josh Marshall: Kerry needs a catch phrase or catch question about the Iraq war, one that provides offense against President Bush’s oft-stated, extremely lame, but also somewhat effective line that the world is safer with Saddam Hussein out of power. In political rhetoric, coherence and clarity almost always trumps substance. So substance must be […]

Kash asks in Why Bush’s Tax Cuts Failed: Shouldn’t the largest tax cuts in history have had more effect? How could such massive tax cuts have such little impact on the economy? The answer is that it matters a great deal exactly how you cut taxes. This short-run Keynesian issue might seem to be a […]

This morning the BEA released its estimate of the US current account balance during the second quarter of 2004. The second quarter deficit was $166bn, meaning that the US borrowed a net $166bn from the rest of the world during those three months. This was done as a mixture of some explicit borrowing (e.g. selling […]

For some reason, while national income has risen at a moderate rate during this recovery, workers’ real salaries and wages have risen almost not at all. Instead, most of the increase in national income during this recovery has come in the form of profits. The portion of national income that goes to workers in the […]

From the front page of today’s Washington Post: $3 Trillion Price Tag Left Out As Bush Details His Agenda The expansive agenda President Bush laid out at the Republican National Convention was missing a price tag, but administration figures show the total is likely to be well in excess of $3 trillion over a decade. […]

Atrios writes this: Goodbye Pensions: US Airways asks to skip pension payment Reason number 8 million why we need Social Security… linking to this story Many of the U.S. airlines are struggling financially with massive debt and very little equity and we noted here on the Pension Benefits Guaranty Corporation may be teetering on the […]

Condoleezza Rice and Senator Joseph Biden appeared on Face the Nation Sunday. Rice was spinning how well the plan to turn over Iraq’s security was going, but Biden basically called her and Sec. Rumsfeld liars. Rice: It’s not going to happen. The Iraqi security forces are being built and built quickly. They performed very well […]

Today’s Guardian gives some details about the investigative reporting done by Seymour Hersh on the prisoner abuse crimes in Iraq and Guantanamo. He appears to have evidence that Rice, Rumsfeld, and senior members of the CIA had personal knowledge of the crimes that US soldiers were perpetrating against suspects. Bush team ‘knew of abuse’ at […]

Stephen Roach of Morgan Stanley begs to differ from Alan Greenspan’s optimistic statement last week that the economy is pretty much past the “soft patch” of the May-July period. Consumers aren’t providing much impetus for the economy, he argues, and neither are firms: Nor is Corporate America stepping up and delivering any autonomous traction of […]

It seems that North Korea may be close to its first test of a nuclear weapon. Some news reports this morning suggested that they may already have done so, though it is now looking increasingly like the large explosion in North Korea over the weekend was not nuclear. If North Korea does indeed perform a […]