EconoSpeak

Against the dogmatic ignorance of a proposed amendment to the US constitution mandating a balanced budget, I propose an alternative, a fiscal neutrality amendment: “No unit of government within the United States may establish voting or other decision procedures that embody a bias in favor of either higher or lower tax rates and revenues.  The federal government may not adopt voting or procedural restrictions that bias decision-making in favor of either larger or smaller fiscal deficits. ...

Rumors are floating on the internet that NEC Chair Lawrence Kudlow is looking for new people to join the team advising President Trump on economics.  Of course, the obvious place to start would be with him, a non-economist, although he has played one on TV a lot, who also has one of the worst documented forecasting records around, poo-pooing both the housing bubble and the early signs of the Great Recession a decade ago, along with forecasting a hyper-inflation out of Obama fiscal policy,...

Immigration politics in both places has gotten very ugly, but it strikes me that in Europe it may be worse than in the US.  We may be about to see the fall from power this weekend of Angela Merkel as Chancellor of Germany over the issue of immigration, with her having been for some time the leading political figure in Europe supporting more moderate policies towards immigrants, even as she has had to retreat more recently from her earlier opening to a million migrants from the war in Syria...

During June 14-17 I was in Madison, Wisconsin for a conference and related carryings-on labeled as the title of this post.  It was organized by local jazz musician, Ben Sidran and his wife Judy, close friends of Mayor Paul Soglin, who was first elected to the city council a half century ago and is now in his third round as mayor, his first starting in 1973.  At age 74, I suspect this is his final term as mayor, and he is running for the Dem nomination for governor, hoping to be the "Bernie...

I have recently returned from participating in a conference in Naples, Italy on "The Economy as a Complex Spatial System" where there many papers and much discussion about the longstanding poverty problem in southern Italy, long labeled "the Mezzogiorno problem."  Mezzogiorno literally means midday or noon, but has long been applied to southern Italy because it is sunny, and middays are supposedly sunny.  Unfortunately the problem is deeply entrenched and now tied to broader disturbing...

In my original post, I didn't say much about the overt racist expression in Gomper and the A. F. of L.'s  advocacy for Chinese exclusion. I guess that is because I read the stuff voluminously a couple of decades ago and it by now it just seemed to me it was common knowledge. Of course it isn't. I was astonished and appalled when I first read it. Not so much at the vileness as at the obsessive repetition of that vileness. The pamphlet, Some Reasons for Chinese Exclusion gives a representative...

Stephen Miller, architect of the Trump administration's immigration policy is getting a lot of bad press these days. Some wags (and even relatives?) juxtapose Miller's photo to one of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, insinuating likeness of facial expression is a predictor of ideological leaning and propaganda technique. The comparison is as unhelpful as it is unfair. A more apt comparison would be with Samuel Gompers, founding president of the American Federation of Labor.  Miller...

A piece of work is Professor Walter E. Williams of George Mason University. Back in February, I flagged a column by Williams in which the nimble prof performed the lump-of-labor fallacy shuck and jive. One of the venues for that rendition of Will Automation Kill Our Jobs was David ("Trump is 100% right") Horowitz's FrontPage Mag.Little did I know at the time that just three weeks earlier, Williams had penned a defense of Trump's (Sessions's, Miller's) immigration policy, Immigration Lies and...

Two business-friendly conservatives, both former senators, Trent Lott and John Breaux, have an op-ed in today’s New York Times announcing the formation of new group, Americans for Carbon Dividends.  Now out of office, they recognize climate change as “one of the great challenges of our generation.”  To counteract it they propose a bipartisan coalition to institute a carbon tax, with all the revenues returned to the public on per capita basis.  The carbon price would cut emissions and spur...

I don't want to pretend that this explains everything. But it is "another brick in the wall," so to speak, if not the keystone. In January 2015, Senator Jeff Sessions produced an "Immigration Handbook for the New Republican Majority," written by his communications director, Stephen Miller. Miller's analysis in the handbook is just the sort of thing that economists would denounce as a "lump-of-labor fallacy." Curiously enough, few did. They were much too busy snatching pensions from future...