Tyler Cowen poses the latest from Michael Mandel as a question to his class as well as to the rest of us: So what would be the payoff from all that thriftiness? A reasonable rate of return on investment, after depreciation, is roughly 7%. So $1.5 trillion in extra assets would have a return of […]

Via Brad DeLong, the Toronto Star reports on Prime Minister Paul Martin’s frustration with President Bush’s trade protectionist stances: Prime Minister Paul Martin struck just the right notes with American business leaders this week, in a forceful but restrained speech arguing that Washington’s refusal to play by the rules on softwood lumber is a “breach […]

AB read Bernie asked me to have a more balanced perspective on that Tamny op-ed as in thinking in terms of debt/asset ratios. While thanking Dryfly for a nice reply, perhaps Bernie had in mind this: What Wessel and others can’t seem to explain is how we Americans supposedly save nothing, yet at the same […]

John Tamny dares to attack the writing of David Wessel: To begin, Wessel bemoans the fact that the U.S., once a creditor country, now owes the rest of the world $2.5 trillion, and talks of steps to “wean the U.S. from growing dependence on the savings of Asians and Europeans.” His characterization itself is misleading. […]

While Mark Thoma thinks Robert Samuelson makes some good points, I’m not so sure: By estimating all three sources, Greenspan and Kennedy reached annual grand totals, shown on the table below. It provides the figures both in billions of dollars and as a percentage of people’s ordinary disposable (after-tax) personal income. The housing money is […]

The Today Show gave the White House another post-Katrina photo-op as George and Laura Bush hung out with Habitat for Humanity. I guess having trashed former President Carter for a quarter of a century, it was time for a GOP leader to kiss and make up. But I tossed my breakfast when President Bush said […]

…two pioneers of Game Theory. Thomas Schelling and Robert Aumann share this year’s Nobel Prize in Economics. Descriptions of their work from nobelprize.org: Thomas Schelling Against the backdrop of the nuclear arms race in the late 1950s, Thomas Schelling’s book The Strategy of Conflict set forth his vision of game theory as a unifying framework […]

There is a basic guideline for financing a purchase; the term of the financing should match the useful life of the acquired product or service. Of course money is fungible, so this isn’t a hard and fast rule. The logic is simple. Any financing is paid off before the asset is retired, allowing the owner […]

In a comment to a Mark Thoma post regarding U.S. farm subsidies, Brad Setser gently reminds me not to fall for the Cato and Heritage spin on the Federal Agricultural Improvement and Reform (FAIR) Act of 1996 – also known as “Freedom to Farm”. It seems the zeal of the Bush Administration to impose future […]

Jonah Goldberg wants us to return to the caller’s question that prompted William Bennett’s poor choice of words: A quick recap: Bennett got a call from a listener suggesting that Social Security was in financial straights because so many taxpayers had been aborted after Roe vs. Wade. The caller was making an ostensibly pro-life point. […]