While it has been a while, let me start by thanking Kash for his post on the CNOOC bid to buy Unocal as well as his various posts that discuss the benefits of free trade. The NRO has even featured very good defenses of free trade from William Buckley and Bruce Bartlett. I was hoping […]
Part V will be my final post on this for several reasons including the possibility that the rightwing reaction to the news that Karl Rove may indeed be the traitor has reached its pinnacle of dishonesty and hypocrisy. As evidenced by this WSJ editorial, they wish to grant Rove a medal of honor for being […]
Now that denial and the so what approach is not working, phase III is in full motion – the smear Joseph Wilson approach, that is. The AP story included this from Ken Mehlman: Ken Mehlman said Rove was the victim of partisan political attacks by Democrats. Rove “was discouraging a reporter from writing a false […]
Should the Fed continue to raise interest rates? Should they raise them faster? Typically economists presume that the central bank cares about two things when deciding how high interest rates should be: the output gap, which tells us how far the economy is from some notion of “full employment”, and inflation. The Taylor Rule is […]
The recent good news on tax revenues has led to renewed discussions of Laffer’s cocktail napkin. For good rebuttals, see Mark Thoma and Paul Krugman. Of course, Donald Luskin has attempted a rebuttal of Krugman. Luskin cannot deny that tax revenues have fallen so he provides a graph of projected nominal Federal tax revenues where […]
At first, it was denial and then so what. Phase III seems to be blame Joe Wilson by my reading of what John Podhoretz is writing over at NRO’s The Corner: Two years ago Joseph C. Wilson IV had a bio available online in which he mentioned his wife Valerie Plame’s name. The bio has […]
President Bush has an inflated view of the costs of addressing emissions of greenhouse gases. Laurie David reminds us of the costs of doing nothing.
Apparently this is the HOT job in California. Over the last 12 months, the number of licensed real estate agents in California has climbed 14% to almost 450,000. Here is the year over year percentage growth in Real Estate agents by quarter. Click on graph for larger image. Maybe California needed more agents. Here is […]
My updates of the labor force participation rate (LF) and the employment to population rate (EP) will have the starting date being January 1997 in part due to my desire to say thank you to James Hamilton. James nicely summarizes my view nicely: The primary concern seems to be that, although the unemployment rate has […]
This question comes from Tom Nugent writing for the National Review: One would think that the Chinese were doing something illegal. But in reality, many countries do exactly what the Chinese are doing, and yet Congress could care less about these other currency “manipulators.” In fact, in targeting China alone, one wonders if some members […]