Tag Archives: politics

Steve Hutchins, a literature professor who teaches “place studies” at the Gallatin School of New York University. A few days ago, the Trump administration announced that one of its goals is to privatize the Postal Service. A private postal system, says the White House proposal, would deliver mail fewer days per week, shift to cluster boxes instead of door and curb delivery, adjust prices and negotiate wages and benefits without government interference,...

The Unreasonableness Of The Policy Defense Of Trump In today’s (12/27/19) Washington Post, regular Trump defender, Mark A. Thiessen published a column, “The 10 best things Trump did in 2019”  This turns out to be mostly things either not worth defending or Thiessen, who simply never criticizes Trump, misrepresenting situations.  Here they are. 10. “He continued to deliver for the forgotten Americans.”  This amounts to unemployment continuing to decline,...

A roadmap to a Democratic Senate supermajority A worthy criticism made by many observers on the Democratic side is that most of the plans being painstakingly described by the Presidential candidates will come to nothing, because the filibuster in the Senate will kill them all. The GOP will then run on the “do nothing” socialist democrats in 2022 and 2024 to retake the Congress and Presidency. As things now stand, that is a reasonable position. Bear in...

I found this interesting.  Mr. Giridharadas was invited to discuss his perspective regarding his themes of his book Winners take all.  He was invited by the Dutch Parliament’s Finance Committee to discuss his book.  All 6 parties showed up.  All had been given the book prior and several had read it.   This is a link to the entire 1.5 hour presentation via Youtube. One of his points that I found most interesting was at 7:13 of the discussion, during his...

run75441: Catching up something we missed. NDD pointed out AB had missed a post on the 15th Amendment which happened two days before the last posted (17th) “Live Blogging  the 15th. “ Live-blogging the Fifteenth Amendment: December 15, 1868 Sen Orrin S. Ferry (R-Conn), in the course of offering a joint resolution to lift the disabilities mandated by the 3rd Section of the Fourteenth Amendment against those who participated in the rebellion: [I]t does seem...

Does Menzie Chinn Or Tyler Cowen Replace Mark Thoma? The retirement of Mark Thoma, whose Economist’s View has been praised on his retirement with having transformed the econoblogosphere back in the mid- noughties by linking regularly, daily in his heyday, to other blogs, including this one. Thanks to him when the big crash happened, there was a wide open debate across levels and schools of thought in economics about what was going down. But for some...

By James Kwak Ever since I finished Economism (and the 2016 elections, which happened about the same time), there has only been one thing I have wanted to write. I tried in “The Importance of Fairness: A New Economic Vision for the Democratic Party,” and in “A New Economic Vision, in 27 Words,” and again in “Hey Democrats, the Problem Isn’t Jobs and Growth.” I wanted to write this thing because it has become clear to me not only that our economic world is screwed up in all sorts of...

Political leanings through time for birth cohorts A chart on “political preferences by generation” from Pew Research has been making the rounds in the past few days. Here it is: Figure 1 This chart tells the simplistic story that older generations are more conservative than young ones. It’s considerably misleading. After all, how did the democrats ever win if older generations, who vote in higher percentages, are always more conservative than younger...

The oncoming generational UK and US political tsunamis No big economic news today, so let me put up a couple of striking charts about the UK election last week. First, the change in party results in 2019 (left) vs. 2017 (right) in millions: Tories:   13.9. 13.6 Labour: 10.3. 12.9 (a 20% decline!) Lib Dems: 3.7  2.4 SNP:        1.2  1.0 Total turnout was down 1.5%. As should be obvious, as the accompanying commentary said, the Tories didn’t win; Labour...

Live-blogging the Fifteenth Amendment: December 17, 1868 In the Senate, Senators Dixon and Ferry, both Republicans from Connecticut, continued the debate from several days prior concerning a federal imposition of African-American voting rights on the States: Dixon: [M]y colleague … proposes to amend the Constitution of the United States in a manner which to me is very revolting, not because I hate negro suffrage, but, sir, I do desire that the proud old...