Tag Archives: politics

The Barr Letter and Useful Idiots of the Jaded Left As everyone knows by now, President Trump has been totally “exonerated” for everything, ever, by a four-page letter from William Barr, the Attorney General whom he appointed expressly to “exonerate” him. With regard to potential obstruction-of-justice, on page three of his letter, Barr cited Special Counsel Mueller’s statement that “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a...

Maybe No Conspiracy Or Coordination, But Lots And Lots Of Collusion Trump and his supporters have been loudly claiming that the Barr letter about the Mueller report has shown “no collusion!” which has been shouted loudly from the rooftops, with many supposedly respectable sources such as the New York Times agreeing with this assessment, thus supporting the long running Trump/Hannity repeated claim. But I note that the big headline on this morning’s...

Dylan Matthews has a typically excellent explainer about taxing the rich. Just click the link. I have one thought. Matthews is soft on capital income. Matthews wrote Saez and Diamond also argued that capital income — income from things like capital gains, corporate profits, dividends, etc. — should be taxed, which broke with previous models of optimal tax theory. (Our current capital gains top rate is 23.8 percent.) Those models had suggested the...

The government shutdown may have caused a mini-recession Aside from being a monumentally poor policy outcome, and aside from the hardship it caused nearly a million workers, the government shutdown may also have caused a general contraction in production, sales, and income, and a slowdown in employment, that if it were longer would qualify as a recession. Because the affected three months straddle Q4 2018 and Q1 2019, both quarters will likely show...

Now that Andrew Yang has made it into the first debate by meeting the fundraising threshold, and being on Morning Joe this morning,  it is time to post this interview of him via Freakonomics. I was impressed by his thought approach.  He is the first person who is talking about the economy as a ecosystem of society.  That is, it’s not just about making money.  He does not come out and say it as I would but I think he is thinking about a question I have...

I just had an unusual experience. I was convinced by an op-ed. One third of the way through “Elizabeth Warren Actually Wants to Fix Capitalism” by David Leonhardt, I was planning to contest one of Leonhard’s assertions. Now I am convinced. The column praises Elisabeth Warren. Leonhardt (like his colleague Paul Krugman) is careful to refrain from declaring his intention to vote for her in the primary. I am planning to vote for her. I mostly agreed with...

Preventing Presidential autocracy: thoughts on reining in Executive power Matt Yglesias posted a jarring tweet this past week when he wrote: He elaborated by linking to a long-form article he wrote four years ago, explaining his position, where in relevant part, he wrote: America’s constitutional democracy is going to collapse. Some day … there is going to be a collapse of the legal and political order and its replacement by something else. If we’re...

The Lordstown Effect Late last week, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) announced that he will not run for president in 2020, declaring that he would prefer to stay in the Senate to criticize President Trump and support whomever the Dems nominate against Trump. He had been highly praised by various commentators, including Chris Matthews, and even conservative columnist, George Will, who wrote an entire column in WaPo praising him. In repeated polling among...

Brad DeLong got a huge amount of attention by saying it was time for neoliberals such as Brad DeLong to pass the baton to those to their left. Alarmingly, he seems to have written this first on twitter. Zach Beuchamp rescued it from tawdry twitter to now very respectable blogosphere with an interview. One interesting aspect is that Brad has very little criticism of 90s era Brad’s policy proposals. Basically, the argument is that Democrats must stick...

A modest proposal to use FICA-style tax withholding as a transition to “Medicare for All” Probably the foremost reform advanced by the Democratic Party at present is “Medicare for All.” Personally I don’t particularly care whether it is ultimately necessary to have single payer (like Canada) or universal coverage (like France or Germany) or a hybrid of each (like Australia). I am fond of the Japanese saying that translates as “There are many paths to the...