As I read Brad DeLong fulfilling the plea from Jonah Goldberg: Well, we want to put up more quotes from the pages of NR, past, present and future there I had to wonder. Brad is a very good economist and yet he provided quotes about NR’s racism and love for Joseph McCarthy but nothing on […]
Robert Balling over at TCS goes after Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” by noting a passage taken from this study, which got NRO’s Jonah Goldberg all excited. Andrew Sullivan more carefully reads what the study said and did not say and links to this piece which has in large font the following: Emissions of greenhouse […]
David Wessel of the Wall Street Journal is feeling bearish this morning: Every so often, economic forces and financial markets collide in ways that make for a tumultuous year — the stock market crash in 1987, the Asian financial crisis and bond-market paralysis in 1998, the bursting stock bubble in 2000. Suddenly, this year has […]
GDP growth in the first quarter of this year was just revised upward to a very robust 5.3%. Yet a lot of analysts are disappointed: WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — The U.S. economy grew at a 5.3% annual rate in the first quarter, the Commerce Department said Thursday in its first revision of gross domestic product estimates. […]
Why does the National Review allow John Tamny to publish such utterly stupid comments: If a homeowner secures a loan that enables him or her to purchase more goods, by definition there is a lender who has foregone that same consumption. There’s no direct stimulus here, just a shift of money from one person to […]
Brad DeLong pays tribute to the late Lloyd Bentsen as does David Rosenbaum. While it was not the purpose of his post, Daniel Drezner pays a very nice tribute to Bill Clinton’s first Treasury Secretary: The White House seems to view the Treasury Secretary as a salesman’s job, as opposed to a position where that […]
Bruce Bartlett and Brad DeLong note that even the Washington Times is challenging the credibility of our Treasury Secretary: According to Mr. Snow’s own numbers, which Mr. Frank had to drag out of him, over the past 12 months average nominal wages, for production and nonsupervisory employees, who account for 80 percent of private-sector employment, […]
Mark Thoma shared with me in an email some very odd rant from Jan Larson: The third in a potentially never-ending “liberals are” generalization series focuses on how liberals are economically ignorant … Liberals don’t understand economics, but that doesn’t stop them from following a “liberal economic theory.” This theory is fallacious in its assumptions […]
Mark Thoma provides a working link to and comments on a 2004 paper by William A. Niskanen and Peter Van Doren: The first conclusion from these tests is that there was no significant effect on the relative level of federal spending … The more important conclusion, consistent with my prior estimate of this equation, is […]
Perhaps macroeconomic professors should assign the latest from Cesar Conda & Ernest S. Christian (C&C) as reading material with an attached essay question designed to let their students find the various flaws in the argument: The recipe for high GDP growth in the future is the same as it was in 2003-04, when the combination […]