Pushing Back For Democracy Around The World Given the massive impetus the presidency of Donald Trump gave to authoritarian and anti-democratic forces around the world, it is worth seeing that his defeat in a democratic election, despite his efforts to illegally overturn it, seems to have been followed by some outbursts of pro-democratic demonstrations in […]
Boston College History Professor Heather Cox Richardson continues her dialogue “Letters from an American” with coverage of events leading up to the Senate trial of a former president and the passage of a much needed economic rescue of the nation’s citizens caught up in an epidemic. “Historians are fond of saying that the past doesn’t […]
Kevin Quinn at Econospeak has an interesting conversation on how the Biden proposed stimulus will play out. “Summers and Ricardo”
James Buchanan, one of the most influential free-market conservatives of the past half century, chastised liberals (progressives) for being romantic about politics. His work on Public Choice Theory urged us to look at “politics without romance”. Buchanan was right. Being overly romantic about politics can lead to serious error, but this error is by no […]
Larry Summers has responded to his critics. My first thought is, yes he is still really smart. Also Olivier Blanchard also thinks the Covid Relief bill is too generous, and, in particular objects to the $1400 for most Americans. Note that Blanchard is the author of the main citation in my critique of Summers (although […]
Just in case you forgot what occurred a month ago yesterday. The Capitol under attack.
It seems that many people have concerns about Larry Summers’s concerns about overdoing the Covid 19 Relief bill. My first reaction to his op-ed is here, but I realize that I had more nearly relevant things to say in the Debt and Taxes series and, in particular in debt and taxes I and debt and […]
January 2021 jobs report: a strong divergence between very weak job gains, but a big drop in unemployment; but the only critical number is the doses of vaccine administered For the past several weeks, based on the increase in initial jobless claims, I have warned that the December employment report might have a negative number, […]
Coronavirus dashboard: Groundhog Day Today is Groundhog Day, America’s version of the midwinter festival, where people can at least begin to look ahead to the coming of spring in the near future. That’s a good analogy for where we are in the COVID pandemic. Let me start with the ghastly news.First, there have been over 26 […]
Early this morning the Senate passed a budget resolution telling committees to spend an additional $ 1.9 T on Covid relief. Yesterday, Larry Summers wrote an op-ed expressing concerns about the imminent resolution. Like many many many people, I disagree in part. Oddly, I think I disagree less strongly with Summers than most US adults […]