"I disagree with you, but I'm pretty sure you're not Hitler." – Jon Stewart
Posted in Blog Post on Jul 30th, 2011
Imagine we’re in a boat with a slow leak. One passenger is trying to bail out water. The other passenger complains that it’s not being done fast enough. Rather than help bail, the 2nd passenger decides the best way to motivate faster work is to punch a larger hole in the boat. Expenditures, as a [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Jul 29th, 2011
This is what passes for fiscal conservatism today: Faced with the very real possibility of default less than seven days away, the current favorite GOP talking point presents President Obama as a politically calculating fear-monger, trying to scare old people and markets with tales of what will happen if we don’t raise the debt ceiling. [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Jul 29th, 2011
Ezra, ever so carefully and politely takes apart the “stimulus didn’t work” meme: Plenty of conservatives are peeking at this morning’s grim GDP numbers, as well as the downward revisions to previous years, and concluding that the stimulus clearly must have failed. “But remember,” snarks James Pethokoukis, “no matter how bad the economy is, Obama [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Dec 10th, 2010
The price tag comes in at $858 billion, larger than the original Obama stimulus plan. It’s been framed as a tax deal, but I think it’s a stealth stimulus. This is basically the only (badly needed) stimulus that was anything near viable, allowing Congressional Conservatives and the Club for Growth to achieve simultaneous orgasm over [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Nov 3rd, 2010
Krugman has some interesting points here. Governments need to step into the breech and provide support while the economy recovers. But instead we have the election of a group of so-called fiscal conservatives from the same party that created the mess who will prolong the slump if they get their way. The whole thing reminds [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Sep 17th, 2010
Bush Tax Cuts Had Little Positive Impact on the Economy – TheFiscalTimes.com. It’s not for lack of trying, but no one can find evidence that Bush’s economic polices helped the economy. The center piece of the policies were the tax cuts. Trillions of dollars in GOP wet dream supply side economics was an abject failure. [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Sep 8th, 2010
Cuz I’m all about “fair and balanced”: Marginal Revolution: The Obama tax plan, or Austro-Obama business cycle theory. Companies combining deductions proposed by Obama for equipment with deductions for borrowing costs would get benefits — including refunds or credits against future taxes – – that exceed the additional income they get from new capital spending, [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Sep 8th, 2010
Economist’s View: “John Boehner’s Stale ‘Two-Step Job Creation Plan”. 1. Restore spending to 2008 levels 2. Extend Bush era tax cut forevah! As noted: So on the one hand, a measure that will make a small dent in the deficit. On the other hand, a measure that will lead to a huge increase in the [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Sep 7th, 2010
The socialist firebrands over at Forbes have begun to tire of the constant “no for the sake of no” from the GOP: GOP Offers Heckling As Economic Solution – StreetTalk – happenings on wall street – Forbes. The GOP’s constant kneejerk rejection of economic ideas simply for the sake of Saying No has as much [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Aug 19th, 2010
Now this would be a change I could believe in: Bill Gross, who runs Pacific Investment Management Co.’s $239 billion Total Return Fund, said that policymakers “should quickly re-engineer” a plan that would refinance all non-delinquent mortgages backed by the federal government. The rate on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage averaged a record-low 4.44 percent in [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Aug 2nd, 2010
FT.com / Reportage – The crisis of middle-class America. When the Financial Times thinks that income distribution and middle class wage stagnation are a problem, I’d say that means it’s a long standing crisis: The slow economic strangulation of the Freemans and millions of other middle-class Americans started long before the Great Recession, which merely [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Jun 29th, 2010
Op-Ed Columnist – The Third Depression – NYTimes.com. Krugman notes that what are effectively austerity policies will cause the current economic malaise to remain, dragging the economy down. Failure to support local and state governments who lack the means to maintain spending levels will in essence reverse the recovery as they are forced to lay [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Jun 6th, 2010
Calculated Risk: Weekly Summary and a Look Ahead. This is really depressing. The stimulus package passed early in the Obama administration helped a bit, but not enough. It was scaled back in size and watered down by turning 40% of it to tax cuts, the least effective means of stimulus. This was done in an [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Apr 18th, 2010
Corporate America took the recession as an excuse to “increase productivity”, which is to say Pay workers less to do more. Despite robust profits, they’re unwilling to resume hiring. Ezra Klein – The jobless recovery, explained. Annie Lowrey brings the data: Wondering what’s behind those recent jobless recovery numbers? 1. Fortune 500 companies tripled their [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Mar 12th, 2010
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner : The New Yorker. Tim Geithner did manage to hold the financial system together for the most part through the worst financial crisis in modern times. Yet he seems reviled on both the left and the right. The media ignores the successes and plays up the failure, as the media so [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Feb 20th, 2010
The New Poor – Despite Signs of Recovery, Long-Term Unemployment Rises – Series – NYTimes.com. Brother can you spare a dime? – Tom Waits version. No one can give voice to the pain of a working man without a job like Tom. I guess the song is making a come back…
Posted in Blog Post on Feb 19th, 2010
Posted in Blog Post on Feb 18th, 2010
Here’s a very cogent observation from the comments at Tyler Cowen’s Marginal Revolution econoblog: It seems to me that the American political system is simply broken. Canada could reduce the size of government and keep health care spending in check because in a parliamentary system with strong party loyalty, individual politicans are given “cover” by [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Feb 17th, 2010
Foreigners cut Treasury stakes; rates could rise – washingtonpost.com. The Wapo notes that the Japanese have overtaken the Chinese as the number one purchasers of American government debt. Apparently we’ve gotten to 88 mph in the Delorean and the flux capacitor has taken us back to 1985… Fear the Japanese Overlords! h/t Ezra Klein The [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Feb 1st, 2010
Matthew Yglesias » Judd Gregg, When Left to His Own Devices, Is an Orthodox Conservative Who Doesn’t Care About the Deficit. h/t to Ezra Klein who points out that no one who voted for the programs that drive the deficit (Bush Era tax cuts, Medicare Part D, two unfunded wars, financial bail out and the [...]
Date: 03/23/2006