Michael Darda tries very hard to pack a lot of wisdom into an NRO op-ed but he writes too much: Consumer spending is driven by income growth, which is the function of employment, the capital-to-labor ratio, productivity, and wage and salary rates. These trends remain sound. So we can expect consumer spending to expand at […]

MaxSpeaks actually provides a partial defense of the President’s Advisory Panel on Tax Reform in regards the attacks from the right. In addition to a cool illustration of the wingnuts, Max writes: They are also crying because the Commission did not use “dynamic scoring.” This would have allowed the Commission to present revenue-losing/deficit-increasing proposals under […]

Dan Froomkin picks up on something that no one else seems to have noticed in yesterday’s broadcast of Morning Edition on NPR: an assertion by Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell (also a 31-year military veteran and former director of the Marine Corps War College) that there is […]

The President of Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf, could give the Bush administration some lessons in fiscal management, and in the unfortunate fact that facing reality sometimes means that you can not simultaneously have your cake and eat it: MUZAFFARABAD, Pakistan – President Gen. Pervez Musharraf suspended a major purchase of U.S. fighter planes, saying Friday during […]

As Kash notes the disappointing news about payroll employment growth, you might be wondering why the unemployment rate fell last month. So was I, so let’s check the news from the household survey. First of all, the household survey indicates employment fell by 17 thousand in September but then increased by 214 thousand last month […]

The creation of net new jobs in October was disappointingly slow. We were able to downplay September’s bad job report because they contained the large but temporary (we hope) negative effects of Katrina and Rita… but it’s a bit harder to brush off October’s weak job creation numbers. In fact, when one considers the fact […]

Via The Carpetbagger Report, I knew things were bad for the president popularity-wise, but I didn’t realize they had gotten quite this bad: Approval Ratings As the Wall Street Journal explains, “Mr. Bush’s current ratings are well below those of Presidents Clinton and Reagan during similar points in their presidency, and near President Nixon’s ranking […]

Given my call to Just Say No to ARNOLD’s propositions, the news reported by Kevin Drum warms my heart that my state will not fall for the replacement governor’s spin. But that’s only Propositions 74 to 77. Proposition 73 is a call to the “right to life” (better put anti-choice) crowd to come help ARNOLD […]

Via the National Review comes the Zell Miller excuse for leaking the name of a CIA operative – attack Joseph Wilson: To the media, it doesn’t matter that the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence says Wilson lied about what he did and with whom he met while investigating Iraqi attempts to purchase “yellowcake” uranium. To […]

Today the BLS released its preliminary estimates of third quarter productivity and worker compensation. Productivity increased 4.8 percent in the business sector, as output grew 4.3 percent and hours declined 0.4 percent. The 4.1-percent rise in nonfarm business productivity occurred as output rose 4.2 percent and hours rose 0.1 percent. These productivity numbers are good; […]