EconoSpeak

In today's (12/27/19) Washington Post, regular Trump defender, Mark A. Thiessen published a column, "The 10 best things Trump did in 2019"  This turns out to be mostly things either not worth defending or Thiessen, who simply never criticizes Trump, misrepresenting situations.  Here they are.10. "He continued to deliver for the forgotten Americans."  This amounts to unemployment continuing to decline, wages beginning to rise, and supposedly 57 percent of Americans saying they are better off...

Well, I can’t miss them because I’m in them.  You can, but why would you?Climate Crisis Mitigation: Implementing a Green New Deal and More Union for Radical Political Economics: Paper Session Friday, Jan. 3, 10:15am–12:15pm Manchester Grand Hyatt San Diego - La Jolla B“Financial Bailout Spending Would Have Paid for Thirty Years of Climate Crisis Mitigation: Implementing a Global Green New Deal and Marshall Plan” – Ron Baiman, Benedictine University“Green New Deal: Interdisciplinary Heterodox...

Yes.So this is the ontological question: is supposed apparently "objective" reality really real?I come at this as someone who in the past questioned this.  I had my period of post-modernist questioning of objective reality. This culminated in a paper, which  I presented as a major address to receive a major recognition at my university, "Belief: Its role in economic theory and action," American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 1993.I shall stand by the vast majority of things I said in...

Niv Elis covers the latest in the Trump fiscal fiasco: President Trump on Friday signed two spending packages totaling $1.4 trillion, averting a government shutdown at midnight. The bills included all 12 annual appropriations bills for the 2020 fiscal year that started Oct. 1. They also included a slew of tax cuts, extending expiring and expired tax breaks and eliminating other taxes that amount to an additional $426 billion in lost revenue, bringing the total cost of the bill to more than...

The retirement of Mark Thoma, whose Economists View has been praised on his retirement with having transformed the econoblogosphere back in the mid- noughties by linking regularly, daily in his heyday, to other blogs, including this one. Thanks to him when the big crash happened, there was a wide open debate across levels and schools of thought in economics about what was going down. But for some time now, Mark has been reducing his activity on his blog, with it stopping being the reliable...

The Washington Post has over the last 7 days published a detailed account based on many secret documents they have spent years obtaining to provide an accurate account of what has happened during what is now the longest war the US has been engaged in.  It is an impressive account, which I have tried to follow, although with finishing a semester I did not read every word ot it. But it is a serious and important serious series, just reaching its conclusion today, along with lots of commentary...

Richard Nixon resigned as president after the House Judiciary Committee recommended he  be impeached, the vote that just happened yesterday for President Trump.  In the case of Nixon that vote was followed by a famous visit from three poerful GOP senators, including Barry Goldwater, who informed Nixon that he had lost the support of the GOP in the Senate.  Of course now we have the GOP Senate Majority Leader McConnell going on Sean Hannity to promise that Trump will not be convicted and that...

Probably not, but maybe.The basic problem is that Trump has long wanted t beat up on other nations in a trade war, but now he is getting impeached and he needs positive news, and the stock markets like word that he is making trade deals. So now we get trade deals, but it is all sort of a mess.So there are two matters here. One involves China, discussed in a new post here by pgl, which I shall comment on later. But my quick take on it is that he has made essentially similar proclamations in...

How gullible is Reuters? China will likely hit $50 billion in purchases of U.S. agricultural products, U.S. President Donald Trump said on Friday after earlier announcing that he would roll back scheduled tariffs on Chinese imports as Washington and Beijing finalized an initial trade deal. That was their opening paragraph. Fortune had a different take: The Markets Have Spoken: Phase One Trade Deal Between the U.S. and China Is “No Victory” - From Shanghai to London, stocks rallied on...

I have been watching the later stages of the still-ongoing House  Judiciary Comm hearing on impeaching Trump.  I have seen Republicans repeatedly ranting on about how this is an effort to undo the "popular election" of Trump, the will of the "63 million" who voted for Trump.Really, how dumb are these people? Hillary had three million more than Trump, 66 million.  He was not the popular winner.  What a joke.Of course impeachment is explicitly an undoing of an election result.  The person...