EconoSpeak

Outgoing Chair of the House Judiciary Committee, Bob Goodlatte is my Congressman.  I even know him, having had civil almost friendly relations.  He has been in office for 26 years.  But his career exemplifies the degeneration of the Republican Party from a Lincoln-derived progressive force in US politics to the racist and reactionary disaster that it has become with Donald Trump as president. The quick story on this is that he was once an aide to a predecessor, M. Caldwell Butler, a...

Imagine that, instead of the dinosaur of a postal service we have today—the product, among other things, of congressional insistence that no government outfit can compete with private business in lucrative new markets—we had an entrepreneurial, innovative public dynamo.  In this other universe, the USPS was always on the lookout for new opportunities to build on its postal infrastructure, providing better services to the public while broadening its revenue stream.USPSʹ, this better but...

Donald Trump lies about everything including military pay: Trump Brags To Troops About A Fictional Giant Pay Raise He Got Them - The president told military personnel in Iraq that they’ll get a raise of over 10 percent, their first in a decade. But it’s 2.6 percent, and they get a hike every year. Dave Jamieson even notes that Bill Kristol has called out Trump on this whopper. But to me this is not the story. The real story is that Trump thinks our troops are stupid. As I read this sad...

A couple of months ago yours truly complained a bit about some fiscal dishonesty coming from Team Trump: He was basically lying to us hoping the public would be too stupid to realize that when the price level rose by 2.5% during the same period, we are talking about a 2% real decrease in tax revenues. But if we look at customs duties we do see an increase in a category that represents a very modest part of Federal tax collections. Back in the 3rd quarter of 2017, these collections were a...

The other night I was sitting at home, locked in a conversation about climate change and race.  How is this a racial issue, I asked?  I realize that the society I live in has pervasive racism, and one should always keep this in mind, but how specifically is climate change worse for nonwhites?Well, it’s all about first and worst impacts, I was told.  People of color are on the front lines.  They are the one experiencing the most severe consequences, and therefore failure to act against...

Yesterday President Trump announced that he was removing all US troops from Syria over the next 30 days.  Today, "Mad Dog" Jim Mattis, the US Secretary of Defense and widely viewed as "the last adult in the room" among the Trump national security team, announced his resignation effective at the end of February.  This is not a coincidence, although his letter makes it clear that he had been thinking about this serously for some time.In his letter the most fundamental issue seems to be his...

As someone who has looked at the world through a political economic lense for decades, I am restless with the “cultural turn”.  Once upon a time, it is said, the bad old vulgarians of the left believed that economic structure—the ownership of capital, the rules under which economies operate and the incentives these things generate—were everything and agency, meaning culture and consciousness, were nothing.  The latter was sometimes claimed to be derivative of the form.Then we had a cultural...

Greg Mankiw read Trumponics by Art Laffer and Stephen Moore so we don’t have to: When economists write, they can decide among three possible voices to convey their message. The choice is crucial, because it affects how readers receive their work. The first voice might be called the textbook authority. Here, economists act as ambassadors for their profession. They faithfully present the wide range of views professional economists hold, acknowledging the pros and cons of each ... The second...

Wow. Sometime ago I here called for Crown Prince of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Mohamed bib Salman bin Abdulaziz al Sa'ud, (MbS) to be rmoved from his position.  How he is punished beyond that for his crimes, I do noit care, especially as I think being prevented from becoming the King of Saudi Arabia will be for him the worst punishment.So the for once the US Senate agrrees with me, 100%, really.  Hey, I have to cheer such an event that has never happened brfore and probably will not again....

I have the deepest respect for Robert Shiller, who has been one of the most serious students of the dynamics of speculative bubbles there is, winning a well-deserved Nobel Prize for his work on this important topic.  One of the more significant parts of his work has been on housing bubbles in particular, with his Case-Shiller indices being the most widely watched housing price measures in the US. Furthermore, in the second edition of his excellent Irrational Exuberance he laid out the case...