EconoSpeak

"I’m not sure I follow the arithmetic here." "It's all down to the numbers - something the article avoids and so is just pie-in-the-sky." "That clearly does not add up." "If you produce X in 30 hours you will produce > X in 40 - unless you are just sitting on your arse for the extra 10 hours." "If you work 40 hours your total output will be higher than if you work 30 hours - unless you are actually destroying output in those extra 10 hours." The U.K. think tank Autonomy has published a...

Ah yes, this is going to be another one of those ironic posts about what a big leftist liberal Ronald Reagan was compared to the current GOP gang in charge of so many of our policies, especially our tax policies.  Certainlly the image of Reagan is one who cut taxes for the high income wealthy, and in general that is the case.  But there were a few items going the other way, and again, compared to current policies some combination of what came out of the two major Reagan tax cuts looks...

It is a sign of how wacko things hve gotten that the truly most important event of the past week has simply beeen buried in the news by all the juffing and puffing over Trump's shutdown ending and these reveleations about VA Governor Northam.  This would be decidion by the US on Feb. 1 to withdraw from the Intermediate Nuclear Force (INF) treaty with Russia, followed by Russia's doing so as well shortly thereafter.  This is both historic and very serious, far more so than Trump's wall or...

Probably not, but reportedly a "White House insider" is afraid it might.Instex is the new exchange created by UK, France, and Germany, to be based i Paris and run by a German banker, to get around US sanctions against Iran.  Apparently it will sell Iran humaanitarian goods such as pharmacueticaals and food not subject to the sanctions, with those being paid for with Iranian petroleum that will then get sold elsewhere, none of this involving any US dollars.  It is probably too small to...

Current media is denouncing  VA Gov Ralph Northam with many demanding he resign now over an unfortunate incident in his youth.I note that that the final crucial person who gave us Obamacre was  the late Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia.  He was in his youth a member of the Klu Klux Klan, indeed held some office in it. In the end when the ultimate votes in the Senate came, which had Rebublicans denouncing him over his 1940s support of the KKK, and  some of them openly hoping he would die as he...

Robert H. Nelson of the University of Maryland Public Policy Department died at age 74 on Dec. 15 while attending a conference in Helsinki, Finland.  He was the leading economist writing about the relationship between religion and economics, notably in three books: Reaching for Heaven on Earth: The Theological Meaning of Economics (1991), Economics as Religion: From Samuelson to Chicago and Beyond (2001), and The New Holy Wars: Economic Religion vs. Enviornmental Religion  (2010).  I spent...

Wait long enough, and great ideas come back around, although not necessarily wearing the same garb.  Elizabeth Warren has just come out for a 2% wealth tax (above $50 million).*  But this is simply an annualized version of my lump sum stochastic jubilee.  What’s the advantage of redistributing the whole thing every 50 years (on average) vs a steady trickle?  A periodic reset would interrupt long run processes of wealth inequality more fully than a tax, so long as the rate of return on...

In Washington Post, 1/25/19 metro section there is a story recounting that the Library of Congress of the US has acquired the only diary of an American slave written in Arabic by Omar bin Said  in 1831, originally from Senagal.  The completion of this world historical accesson will now be able to proceed now that the ridiculous US federal governmint shhutdown so stupidly ordered by Preisident Trump has come to an end for nowOmar bin Said was a deeply serious Islamic scholar up until his...

From Siligato v. State: The story starts in early 1985 when one Arthur Hall, a special agent of the F.B.I., was arrested following a four-month joint investigation by the New Jersey State Police and the F.B.I. into Hall's suspected involvement in an extensive motor-vehicle theft operation in the Atlantic City area. At that time Siligato was asserted to be a confidential informer of both the F.B.I. and the State Police.  According to Sheeran's affidavit in support of the warrant, Hall,...

As many now know, a large group of prominent economists, led by a large group of Nobel Prize winners, has published a petition in the Wall Street Journal.  This petition declares the idea of putting a tax on carbon and then returning the receipts from it to the population on an even per capita basis to be the best and most efficient plan for dealing with global warming.  This group continues to encourage more professional economists to sign this petition.  I had previously received an...