by Kenneth Thomas(reposted from Middle Class Economist)  Mike Kimel at Angry Bear has several nice posts on the “Laffer Curve” that underlies much of conservative economic orthodoxy in this country. As you may know, Art Laffer famously claimed that at tax rates of 0 and 100%, you would get zero tax revenue, and that in […]

by Mike Kimel I was searching for some information and I stumbled on a post Scott Sumner wrote last year about Robert Skidelsky’s biography of John Maynard Keynes. I haven’t read Skidelsky’s book, nor do I know Skidelsky, and its been awful long time since I read Keynes, but this seems an odd complaint: I’m […]

by >Mike Kimel I’ve been writing about the relationship between tax rates and growth since I started blogging in 2006. A lot of those posts have focused on the quadratic relationship between tax rates and growth. That is, it turns out that if you take US data going back to when the BEA started keeping […]

by Mike Kimel Is Economics a Science – Three Comments In the last few days I came across three very different posts, each of which covers (to some extent) the question of whether economics is a science. In order of how focused on the posts are on that particular question…. Barry Ritholtz is on fire […]

by Mike Kimel Japan: The Post-WW2 Rise, the 1980s Peak, and the Decline – A Simple TheoryCross-posted at the Presimetrics blog. A lot has been written about the disaster in Japan. I don’t have much I can add to that, except that like everyone else (or at least everyone civilized), I am so very sorry […]