EconoSpeak

Avik Roy entitles his latest spin with: Why Ronald Reagan Embraced Universal Coverage: ‘No one in this country should be denied medical care for lack of funds,’ said the Gipper. Here is more from this select reading of history: Take the example of health care. Most readers of Olsen’s book will be surprised to learn that Reagan embraced universal coverage. In “A Time for Choosing” — Reagan’s celebrated conservative manifesto delivered at Goldwater’s 1964 Republican National Convention —...

Menzie Chinn back on February 20, 2016 had some fun with the defenders of that awful paper by Gerald Friedman (who never even bothered to estimate potential GDP as of 2016 and how it might grow over a decade): One thing that should be remembered is that the trend line extrapolated from 1984-2007 implies that the output gap as of 2015Q4 is …-18%...I want to stress that estimating potential GDP and the output gap is a difficult task. It is a difficult task and perhaps the CBO estimate of the...

This claimed by Catherine Rampell on the Washington Post ed page today, with a column entitled what is in quotes in the title of this post, with the answer being caveated as only being true after "the tweeter-in-chief," clearly the most dangerous man in Washington.  Mulvaney is the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) chief who has been questioning the need to raise the debt ceiling and voted against doing so on a regular basis when he was in Congress.  While Treasury Secretary Mnuchin...

I regularly hear and see on media and the internet that Trump "has accomplished nothing in six months" or variations on that, with some of these remarks focusing more on his legislative agenda, with discussions about whether it is "dead" or not here after only six months, which is either a very long time or a very short time.   I think this rhetoric is both unwise and inaccurate. It is unwise because it suggests that we want his agenda to be passed, to the extent we know what it is...

More Feargus O'Connor (1844) on labour's objections to machinery (see my earlier post on Crowding Out and the Social Overhead Costs of Labor for more context and analysis): And now, sir, let me state my principal objections to the unrestricted use of machinery. First, it places man in an artificial state, over which the best workman, the wisest man and most moral person, has no control. Secondly, while it leads to the almost certain fortune of those who have capital in sufficient amount to...

Donald Trump has engaged in so many outrageous statements and conduct that it has become very difficult to remember which of  those were really the most outrageous, the most morally contemptible, the ones that should have led his supporters to have abandoned but they did not, the ones that merited above all others the most Extreme Contempt.The events of the last 24 hours have clarified for me what was the moment in 2016 when Trump crossed the line, when he committed an act of Extreme...

Another strange twist in the convoluted lump-of-labor saga. Chartist leader Feargus O'Connor refuted the "Treasury View" -- aka "crowding out" -- in 1844. O'Connor's tract is long-winded and sentimentalized an idyllic past but it also contains some cogent analysis of why workers were (and should still be) wary of the exploitative use of technology by capitalist firms.O'Connor's critique took the form of a dialogue, which parodied and refuted an earlier dialogue, "The Employer and Employed,"...

I teach at Evergreen State College.  Early this spring I became alarmed at the rapid deterioration of collegiality and respect for dissent on campus, and I drafted a letter which I hoped to circulate for signatures—but I sat on it.  I thought: not enough faculty would be willing to sign and this would just expose how isolated I was in my concern.  Or: the letter would only add to the momentum for polarization, since, despite its protestations, it wouldn’t be seen as simply a statement about...

My earlier post needs a better title and a clear reason why Norway’s corporate profits were near 10% of its GDP even as it had a lower statutory corporate profits tax rate than nations like Australia or the U.S. Mark Thoma calls Norway an outlier: Since it looks like all that's been done here is to draw a line through an outlier, Norway … I haven't actually run the regression, but it looks clear to me that revenues rise with tax rates, and the fit also looks better than in the first graph....

Brad DeLong reminds us of Kevin DOW 36000 Hassett second dumbest moment giving credit to Mark Thoma for the original take down of Hassett’s Laffer trick: The Wall Street Journal says Kevin Hassett has discovered the Laffer curve, but I think these data might say something else ... The blue line is supposed to be the Laffer curve, but this is far from compelling. Since it looks like all that's been done here is to draw a line through an outlier, Norway (an outlier that in other contexts we...