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Tag Archives: Featured Stories

The Grand Illusion 2.0

The Grand Illusion 2.0 Introductory note: this is a very long epistle. But I think my point needs to be made fully and at length. Before you go further, in fairness here is the TL:DR version: Advocates of free trade and globalization were taken aback a week ago by the assumption by China’s President Xi Jinping of rule for life. This was because it runs completely contrary to their theory that free trade leads to economic liberalization, which in turn...

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Wealth and the National Accounts: Response to Matthew Klein

by Steve Roth    (via Asymptosis) Wealth and the National Accounts: Response to Matthew Klein I’m both abashed and delighted that the truly stand-out econ writer Matthew Klein has offered wonderfully fulsome praise of one of my pieces, Why Economists Don’t Know How to Think about Wealth, and some very interesting discussion as well. Some responses here. Please excuse me if I repeat some of the points from the first article. >His key point is that...

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Kudlow

Kudlow Menzie Chinn notes: Mr. Kudlow is apparently on the short list for new National Economic Committee chair. Maybe a good time to review some of his macro predictions. Yours truly goes back memory lane: But let’s turn back the clock to the first term of the Bush43 Administration when Kudlow writing for the National Review was all in defending Bush’s fiscal stimulus and arguing at several points how the labor market was booming even when it was not....

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No, Matt Yglesias, Trump is *not* “probably gonna be re-elected”

No, Matt Yglesias, Trump is *not* “probably gonna be re-elected” While I generally agree with the political and social observations of Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein, their takes that involve the economy frequently drive me crazy. So it was this morning when I encountered these two tweets from Yglesias: This is just incredibly shallow analysis and, well, wrong! Presidential and midterm elections are completely different beasts. Midterms are decided...

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Why I’m worried about the decline in real wages

Why I’m worried about the decline in real wages This is a follow-up to my post yesterday concerning the decline in real average and aggregate wages. Why should the data from just one month cause me to warn that “This is Bad?” To show you, let’s decompose the data into CPI and nominal aggregate wages, shown in the below two graphs, the first of which covers the inflationary era of the 1960s and 1970s, and the second covers the disinflationary era since:...

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Baumol Cost Disease and Relative Prices – Part 2

Baumol Cost Disease and Relative Prices – Part 2 Many thanks to the Angrybear for reposting this as well as some excellent comments (save that absurd contention I’m a Luddite). If you check the comments over at Mark Perry’s place you will see that Paul Wynn made the same point I made and even linked to Timothy Lee: This became known as Baumol’s cost disease, and Baumol realized that it had implications far beyond the arts. It implies that in a world of...

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Healthcare Notes

National Health Spending at $3.5 Trillion in 2017, CMS Says: CMS is reporting healthcare spending was $3.5 trillion in 2017. National healthcare spending grew by 4.6%, up 3 tenths of 1% from 2016. The increase was blamed on increased spending for Medicare and higher premiums for healthcare insurance. The increase in healthcare premiums can be partially attributed to Republicans blocking the Risk Corridor – Reissuances Programs which eliminated competition...

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Watch Out for Charlie Kirk’s Treacle Tart

“There’s many a fly got stuck in there.” Who is Charlie Kirk? He is the 24-year old executive director and founder of Turning Point USA. Jane Meyer profiled the organization in the New Yorker in December: Based outside of Chicago, Turning Point’s aim is to foment a political revolution on America’s college campuses, in part by funneling money into student government elections across the country to elect right-leaning candidates. But it is secretive about...

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Distractions, Distractions

Distractions,  Distractions Wow!  We have a great controversy!  A squib of a memo by the House Intel Comm has completely devoured the media.  A constitutional crisis!  Egad!  In two weeks, or maybe two months, it will be nothing.  But for now, well, very very very serious. At a minimum it has distracted everybody from Trump’s gloriously successful State of the Union speech, which was so well received until this distraction that he thinks will bring about...

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The National Debt Disappeared

Other than a small number of fiscal conservatives who are ignored by their own party, it doesn’t seem like anyone really cares about the National Debt any more. That’s a relatively new thing. Doing something about the Debt was one of the platforms of the GW Bush campaign in 2000. Of course, what he actually did to the Debt was the precisely the opposite of what he told us he was going to do. Then came Obama, whose economic policies – certainly with...

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