Kash’s post on the latest consumer price inflation news allows us to raise a couple of additional points. Our first graph provides the latest on real wages for production or nonsupervisory workers, which have generally been declining over the past two years as nominal wage increases have not kept pace with consumer price inflation. While […]
I’ve taken the liberty of composing a picture that addresses the implausible notion that the Federal government’s budget deficits are the result of “ungoverned forces”. The graph below shows the on-budget federal budget balance – that is, the budget balance excluding the Social Security Trust Fund surplus – and the ways in which various deliberate […]
While Mark Thoma has a few words about the partisan garbage Karl Rove delivered to the American Enterprise Institute, let me start here: The economy itself began slowing in the third quarter of 2000 as GDP declined by an annual rate of 0.5 percent. And all of this took place before George W. Bush set […]
The latest op-ed from David Brooks is entitled From Freedom to Authority and includes this spin: In the 1970’s and 80’s, conservatives felt the primary threat was the overweening nanny state. Ronald Reagan tried to loosen the structures that restricted individual initiative and led to national sclerosis. He and Margaret Thatcher deregulated, privatized, cut tax […]
Mark Thoma points to a couple of pieces from Robert Reich, which I want to discuss in a bit. Mark leads with some nonsense from R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr.: There is a bigotry against the term Supply-Side Economics. That is the only way to explain it. The prejudices of those who for decades have believed […]
Last Thursday, we suggested that Greg Kaza more carefully read the paper by Greg Mankiw and Matthew Weinzierl that Kaza used as evidence for supply-side economics. We are happy to report that Brad DeLong has read this paper and notes: The abstract is misleading. It should read, “The feedback is surprisingly large: in the long […]
John Tamny starts his latest op-ed with some wisdom from Herbert Stein: Seeking to shift blame away from the Federal Reserve and the Nixon White House for the oil shocks of the early 1970s, the late Herbert Stein said, “My devotion to the old-time religion is not so great as to make me believe that […]
On Meet the Press, Gingrich said Republicans and Democrats need to have a bipartisan dialogue but he also said: if you represent a party whose contract is with San Francisco and Vermont, you can hardly explain what your future is. I mean, Congresswoman Pelosi cannot explain what her speakership would be because it would be […]
Deroy Murdock of the National Review gets something right! On spending, LBJ’s Great Society seems greater than ever. Washington Republicans’ Spend-O-Rama famously included 13,997 pork-barrel projects that lodged like baby-back ribs in last year’s appropriations bills. President Bush’s $92.2 billion request for Iraq War and Hurricane Katrina funding has expanded to $109 billion after Senate […]
In their coverage of that $70 billion addition to the Federal debt, the Washington Post adds: House Majority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) said that holding the line on spending while allowing the low tax rates to spur the economy will close the gap. But the spending problem lies not so much with the federal […]