The above is a more-than-semi-serious question. I’ll be blogging/tweeting the Kauffman Foundation’s Bloggers’s Forum tomorrow from 9:30-3:30 EDT (8:30-2:30 here in Kansas City; 6:30-12:30 in DeLong/Thomaville; in Hawaii, they’re still watching Dave Garroway). You can tell it has reached maturity because tomorrow’s presenters include J. Bradford DeLong, Scott Sumner, Tyler Cowen, and Karl Smith—and that’s […]

Here I thought I was fed up with the Empty Suit in the White House: What it says to me is all that matters is Obama’s reelection (see, for example, the pivot to deficit reduction) — when the timing’s right for that, things will happen — but don’t keep your fingers crossed otherwise. If you […]

Mark Thoma responds to the meme that the social safety net encourages bad behavior overall: The idea that the unemployment problem is due to lack of effort on behalf of the unemployed rather than a lack of demand is convenient for the moralists, but inconsistent with the facts. The problem is lack of demand, not […]

H/t Mike Kimel Via Economist’s View This is from Jialan Wang: Benford’s Law and the Decreasing Reliability of Accounting Data for US Firms, by Jialan Wang: …[T]here are more numbers in the universe that begin with the digit 1 than 2, or 3, or 4, or 5, or 6, or 7, or 8, or 9. […]

From my email (with formatting lost): Ask the Experts: What’s Next for the Economy? It’s a big week for the American economy. President Obama announced his plans to reduce the deficit on Monday, and Wednesday afternoon the Federal Reserve announces its new plan to boost growth. Do these proposals make sense? And what do they […]

Mark Thoma remembers that in the last Congressional elections, Republicans campaigned on how the Democrats were bringing uncertainty to the economy. “Does anyone think that uncertainty has been reduced since Republicans gained a majority in the House of Representatives?”

Mark Thoma joins Dr. Black, putting him one-up on some Liberal Bloggers Who Should Know Better.* Thoma: 1. You have to make the Republicans pay in terms of eroded public support before they will agree to cooperate at all. The president in particular has not played a long-run strategy, the Republicans have, and the results […]

We have just printed the eleventh (11th) straight week in which new jobless claims have exceeded 400,000 people. As Krugman notes, “The Fed predicts disastrously high unemployment as far as the eye can see(pdf) [a]nd, in response to this dire prospect, it declares its work done.” So this it is almost palliative that Barry Ritholtz […]

Mark Thoma is a truly stand-up guy. We need more like him screaming for the unemployed and underemployed. I’ll comment just a bit more after Mark’s commentary. Mark Thoma on The Slow Recovery of Unemployment: I don’t like to make economic forecasts. Though I do it on occasion, I generally leave that to Tim Duy […]

Update: Brad DeLong looks at the data and suggests that the problem may be that the current President is as innumerate as the previous one. Mark Thoma quotes James Kwak: So no, I don’t think Obama is abandoning his principles for political advantage; I think these are his principles. And while I’m upset at him, […]