Alphabet Soup From the Alpha Quadrant I’m not actually sure where the Alpha Quadrant is, but based on this DeLong post, it must be somewhere near Berkeley. Here’s my favorite paragraph: And every single senior Republican economic policy appointee comes out of a look back at the past three years looking very badly. X fails […]

Where’s the Fork? You’ve likely heard that Dean fired his campaign manager, Joe Trippi, yesterday. The more surprising news, news I hadn’t heard until today in Salon, is that he’s out of money too: According to staffers, Dean held a meeting with campaign workers in which he announced that there was no money to pay […]

Pre-War Intelligence Inquiry? David Kay is now advocating an independent investigation: David A. Kay, the former chief weapons inspector in Iraq, called on Wednesday for an independent inquiry into prewar intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs, but he said he did not believe that the Bush administration had pressured intelligence analysts to exaggerate the threat. […]

The Causes of the Budget Deficit: A Reckoning In case you missed it yesterday: There seems to be some disagreement about the true cause of the US’s current budget woes. Conservatives blame it on federal spending, which they claim has risen too fast. The Bush administration, on the other hand, blames the state of the […]

Tariffs and Jobs The bloggers over at The American Street are supposed to be focusing — sometimes, but not exclusively — on swing states. While Michigan is very likely to vote Democratic, the margin was still too narrow for comfort: 51%-46%, with 2.6% other (mostly Nader, I suspect). On second thought, if Nader voters comprised […]

No Criticizing Reagan or Bush II As you may have heard, CBS (the network that didn’t bring you a somewhat unflattering biographical movie about the Reagans) is refusing to broadcast MoveOn’s ad during the Super Bowl. MoveOn is responding by doing what it does best: organizing emails, letters, and phonecalls. Since my favorite ad was […]

History Never Exactly Repeats Itself In the late 1960s, the US had a very expansionary monetary policy. To keep their currencies from appreciating, the world’s major central banks had to keep buying dollars, effectively expanding their own money supply at the same fast rate. Being inflation-shy, however, they hated doing so, and soon stopped. That […]

Calculating the Cause of the Budget Deficit You can check out a thorough decomposition of the causes of the US budget deficit at The American Street. The punchline: the state of the economy only accounts for a small fraction (less than 15%) of the US’s budget problems this decade. On the other hand, tax cuts […]

Greenspan and Job Security Fed Chair Alan Greenspan must both want to keep his job and think that Dean is going to be the next president. On Friday, CNN and others reported that Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean tried out a new tactic Friday while campaigning in New Hampshire, accusing Federal Reserve Bank chairman Alan […]

Yet More Speaking for Itself This time, from John Ashcroft: “Weapons of mass destruction including evil chemistry and evil biology are all matters of great concern, not only to the United States but also to the world community. They were the subject of U.N. resolutions,” Ashcroft said. We’ll see whether the nefarious chemistry and biology […]