EconoSpeak

We now have two responses to the climate emergency battling it out among House Democrats, the “aggressive” 2030 target for net zero emissions folded into the Green New Deal and a more “moderate” 2050 target for the same, just announced by a group of mainstream legislators.  How significant is this difference?  Does where you stand on climate policy depend on whether your policy has a 2030 or 2050 checkpoint?I say no.  Neither target has any more than symbolic value, and what the government...

I don’t usually like to repeat myself in these posts, but when it comes to the media getting suckered by Trump and serving as bots in his reelection campaign, I have to get shrill: no more headlines reporting on Trump’s tweets, taunts and tantrums!  Just stop!  Now!The New York Times is one of the worst, and they would do well to read their own reportage on the matter.  Today’s edition carries an article entitled Trump Aims Words at Working Class, but Policies at Its Bosses, and the body...

This is probably just a whiny complaint of well-known and long running issues.  Indeed for a long time most blog sites (not to mention most twitterspheres and Instogram Idiotspheres) have been mono-partisan in those who participate in their discussions/debates. This has been true for a long time for most sites in the Econoblogosphere, including this site, which clearly tilts "left," even though we have always been open to comments from a wide variety of views.I have in mind here a particular...

Greg Mankiw reads this story and writes: Staffers in the Sanders campaign, who are working on salary, complain that they are paid less than the $15 per hour that Senator Sanders advocates for the minimum wage. So Sanders raises their hourly wage. Does that increase their income? No, because he raised the hourly wage by cutting the number of hours they work! Of course, if a President Sanders raised the federal minimum wage, I am sure he would be confident that the change would not have any...

The world of economics suffered a sad loss a few days ago (July 15) with the death of Frank Ackerman.  Frank was a mainstay of the activist left within the profession; he was one of the founders of the magazine Dollars and Sense and could always be found at activities of the Union for Radical Political Economics.  He was notable for being one of the most exacting of critical economists, never substituting political passion for careful analysis and documentation of his evidence.  His...

OK, sorry if this is just over the top, but this evening Trump's close pal, Sean Hannity, has gone over the top both predicting and clearly supporting a full blown attack on Iran, "take out all their nuclear facilities."  Curiously a sign of how over the top this is was given by one of his guests, a colonel, warned that it would take nuclear weapons by the US to fully take out the most deeply buried  Iranian capabilities.I am reasonably certain that part of why Hannity was sounding the war...

Yes.  For centuries throughout the entire world that crucial body of water has been called "the Persian Gulf," even though in 1935 the nation of Persia changed its named to "Iran."  I became aware several decades ago when I was in Saudi Arabia that they have a really big fuss that it should be called "the Arabian Gulf."  I think maybe their fellow Arab GCC members have been supporting this nonsense as well, but nobody else did, certainly not the US.But now here it is, and I had noticed in...

Two days ago in WaPo, Catherine Rampell published a highly reasonable column calling for eliminating the century-old US debt ceiling, something no other nation has ever had, a position supported by a wide array of economists including such a conservative GOP stalwart as the recently deceased Martin Feldstein, a former CEA Chair for Reagan.  I have made numerous posts here on this in the past, but the issue is hot again as once again the debt ceiling is being rapidly approached.The latest...

This may be.  In April DPRK leader Kim Jong Un was finally named "Head of State," more specifically Chair of the Commission for State Affairs.  Implicitly until now that position had been held by his late father, although he has long held certain crucial ruling positions such as head of the ruling party and commander-in-chief.  Nkeconwatch now reports on a July 12 announcment that at the same time in April there was also a rewrite of the North Korean constitution. Nkeconwatch sees certain...

On July 16, 1969, a half century ago today, a Saturn 5 rocket launched from Cape Kennedy on its way to the moon, where Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin would land on the moon on July 20 before returning successfully to earth.  Recent books have made clear just how close a call it was with many things nearly going wrong that would have doomed them, including such oddities as Aldrin using a felt tipped pen to adjust a minor switch that was needed for them to return.  My late father played an...