PlameGate & the Questioning of Dick Cheney (CNN) — Vice President Dick Cheney has been interviewed by federal prosecutors investigating a leak that disclosed the identity of an undercover CIA operative, a Bush administration official told CNN. John King of CNN also notes that the New York Times broke this news on June 5 in […]

Reagan’s Legacy Ronald Reagan had a sense of grace and a way with words that could charm friend and foe alike – something other conservatives might pay more attention to. Conservatives love to say Reagan stuck to his principles and focused on three objectives: (1) ending the Soviet empire; (2) cutting taxes; and (3) reducing […]

Higher Gas Prices are a Good Thing? One of the benefits of contributing to the Kerry campaign are emails with current news on hot economic topics – often serious and fair&balanced unlike those biased Bush-Cheney cartoons. But last week, the Kerry camp had this silly cartoon called the “Oil House”. It points out how top […]

Leisure has increased under Bush-Cheney At the risk of having some very good labor economist critique this, I’ll put forth a Leisure Index (LI) simply defined as the civilian employment to population ratio (R) times the average weekly hours – total private industries (H). When Bush took office R = 64.4% and H = 34.2. […]

Employment rises by 248,000 That is the Establishment Survey figure. The unemployment rate stayed at 5.6% as the increase in the Household Survey figure rose by 196,000 while this survey reports a 233,000 increase in the civilian force. The employment to population ratio remains at 62.2%.

Postcards from Old Europe – Are you better off now than you were four years ago? You might have noticed that there have been no postcards in the past couple of weeks. The reason is quite simple – your author was off enjoying one of the perks of working in Europe (30 days paid vacation […]

PlameGate: Did Bush know? Capitol Hill Blue reports: Witnesses told a federal grand jury President George W. Bush knew about, and took no action to stop, the release of a covert CIA operative’s name to a journalist in an attempt to discredit her husband, a critic of administration policy in Iraq. Their damning testimony has […]

Stiglitz on employment during recoveries The Bureau of Labor Statistics will release employment figures for May 2004 tomorrow. If we get good news, expect the White House and many in the press to tout how strong the economy is. The following passage from page 121 of Joseph Stiglitz’s Globalization and its Discontents may be on […]

Oil Prices: give Stephen Moore some credit Moore rightfully criticized a USA Today headline “Oil Prices Hit Highest Since Sept. 1990” and has been saying that we should look at oil and gasoline prices in inflation adjusted terms. Now I’m not one to praise NRO writers especially when they point out what is often taught […]

Low & middle income groups bear burden of the tax cuts William G. Gale, Peter R. Orszag, and Isaac Shapiro have provided an analysis of who gains from the recent tax cuts and who loses in an analysis that respects the long-run government budget constraint. Households with incomes over $1 million have current tax cuts […]