Follow the money’s good. But, sometimes, looking for the me(s) in what’s in it for me works better. Trump wanted something from Kevin. Marjorie did too; was among the first to make her deal. Then, Matt, Paul, Scott, Lauren, and Andy (after being together on C-Span for four days, all of us are on a first name basis). As for the ‘what’s in it for me’ part? A lot. For Paul, Scott, and ‘I’m so out of here Louis’; maybe hard time. Maybe so for Kevin...

Whatever. The only thing the bill does that actually counts financially is defining gold and silver as currencies rather than commodities, thereby "eliminating the state capital gains tax on gold and silver." Otherwise it confuses "money" as a token used in exchange with a currency as a unit of account functioning as the basis of an accounting system.SchiffGoldMissouri Bill Would Take Steps Toward Treating Gold and Silver as Money

As has been reported, it will only take a single congressperson, acting in what is known as a Jeffersonian Motion, to move to remove the Speaker if he or she goes back on their word or policy agenda.A “Church” style committee will be convened to look into the weaponization of the FBI and other government organizations (presumably the CIA, the subject of the original Church Committee) against the American people.Term limits will be put up for a vote.Bills presented to Congress will be single...

The GSCPI peaked at 4.3 standard deviations above its historical mean at the end of 2021, after which it declined substantially. The initial period of decline saw it drop to 2.8 by March 2022, after which it temporarily increased in April, primarily due to pandemic lockdowns in China and the Russia-Ukraine war. The GSCPI then experienced five consecutive months of declines, reaching a low of 0.9 in September. However, the past three months have witnessed a pause in the reversion to the...

What has always bothered me about the “experimentalist” school is the false sense of certainty it conveys. The basic idea is that if we have a “really good instrument” we can come up with “convincing” estimates of “causal effects” that are not “too sensitive to assumptions.” Elsewhere I have written  an extensive critique of this experimentalist perspective, arguing it presents a false panacea, andthat allstatistical inference relies on some untestable assumptions … Consider...

[embedded content]An Academic Lecture from Gintis I know of Herb Gintis more of as an Internet personality than through his work, mostly with Samuel Bowles. I also know of him as an important historical figure in one of those periodic purges of the Harvard economics departments. As I understand it, he went to Harvard for a graduate degree towards the end of the 1960s, intending to study mathematics. He was against the Vietnam war and fell in with a radical crowd. Given this interest in...