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. […]
CalculatedRisk provides a nice summary of the September Jobs Report. I suppose the 35 thousand drop in employment per the Payroll Survey (17 thousand drop per the Household Survey) is not as bad as one might have feared given the Katrina effect, which the BLS readily admits is hard to measure. The employment-population ratio fell […]
Republicans are split over how to pay for the Katrina-Rita relief and reconstruction efforts. President Bush wants to temporarily increase the deficit. Fiscal conservatives like Andrew Samwick have fiscal offsets in mind to avoid adding even more government debt to our children’s future. Jerry Bowyer sides with Bush: George W. Bush is not a Goldwater […]
Tax Analysts reports: Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., on October 5 said he hopes to energize the tax reform debate with a proposal to replace the federal income tax with an 8.5 percent national retail sales tax on individual purchases and business profits … DeMint plans to introduce the bill, a hybrid of a retail sales […]
John Tamny continues the National Review’s gold bug obsession: In 1898 Knut Wicksell said there was “no need to waste words proving how important it is that the exchange value of money or, what is the same thing seen from the opposite angle, the general level of commodity prices, remains as stable and constant as […]