Tag Archives: politics

We do not know how severe the covid-19 epidemic will be or how much economic and social pain it will cause, but it clearly has the potential to kill hundreds of thousands or even millions of Americans, and the economic consequences could include a deep recession and even a financial crisis that will cause misery to tens of millions of people. Testing is key to getting the epidemic under control, and it is not clear to me that policymakers are being nearly...

by Dale Coberly; CORONA VIRUS AND SOCIAL SECURITY, ANOTHER GRAND BARGAIN? Republicans are showing what they are made of. After claiming that the Corona Virus was not serious, or was well contained, or was Democrat fake news; they are now admitting it is serious and calling it a Chinese virus. Fox News explained to a reporter they don’t expect “turning the ship around” to cause any problem with their viewers. They did not say that is because their viewers...

In the quaint, pre-coronavirus world of February, the economy was already very weak I have a post up at Seeking Alpha, taking a look at this morning’s retail sales and industrial production reports for February, and briefly considering their implications for employment in the coming months, even before the impact of coronavirus. Here’s a graph that didn’t make it into that post, showing the past 25+ years of real retail sales (red), jobs (blue), and real...

This is a copy and paste of Dahlia and Mark’s excellent critique of what is happening at SCOTUS and the Federal Court System under Justice Chief Justice John Roberts’ tutelage, McConnell loading the courts with patronage, and Trump’s whatever. I have seen some condemn the verbiage of Senator Schumer calling out Justices Kavanaugh and Gorsuch as threatening and yet at the same time ignoring the courts’ partisan behavior which will have an impact for years...

Welt am Sonntag is reporting our honorable President is attempting to bribe lure a German company CureVac to develop a vaccine  to be used only in the US. Germany’s Health Ministry confirmed a report in the newspaper “Welt am Sonntag”, which said President Donald Trump had offered bribes funds to lure the German company CureVac to the United States, and the German government was making counter-offers to tempt it to stay. Welt am Sonntag quoted an...

Trump Administration Continues to Attack the Environmental Projections First Put Into Place by the Nixon Administration If you, the reader, are uncertain whether to support Trump or whoever the Democratic candidate turns out to be, I urge you to consider the devastating reduction in protections for clean air, clean water, and clean land (thus also clean air/water and food) under the Trump administration’s ‘hate anything Obama’ approach that has put...

On the topic of Coronavirus and the travel ban, Trump’s travel ban sidesteps his own European resorts. The President’s newly implemented European travel restrictions to the US conveniently side step a ban on nations where three Trump-owned golf resorts are located. No politics there, just plain greed. Trump has been under fire for visiting his properties in both countries as president and using taxpayer money to fund his trips to and from while at his...

This is what exponential growth looks like I’ve placed an added emphasis on high frequency indicators, as they will be the first to show the impact of coronavirus on the economy. This morning chain store sales for last week were reported. They were: – Redbook +6.0% YoY – Retail Economist unchanged w/w, +0.9% YoY Needless to say, there was no impact at all on the Redbook number. While the Retail Economist number was definitely weak, there have been other,...

When I was commenting at Slate’s  Moneybox and Best of the Fray sites at least a decade or so ago, Dahlia Lithwick had taken over Jurisprudence. She always gave a sound and fair analysis of court decisions, the impacts of those decisions, and the resulting politics coming out of them. Fast forward   .  .  .  I was reading Schumer’s “reap the whirlwind” comments wondering why he would make such and then wondering why Chief Justice Roberts had not winced...

Hey, I am stealing one (or at least a partial) from another blog. It is on target as I would say and it will provoke comments or at least some thinking about the issue. Dying of Whiteness, How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland Lawyers, Guns, & Money, Erik Loomis (Blog writer and Reviewer) I have not read this book; but it appears to be interesting enough to read. A couple of paragraphs in the review caught my attention...