ust last week, I made fun of Paul Krugman after he publicly said that a fake threat from invading aliens would be good for the economy since the earth would waste a bunch of money on pointless defense outlays. Yesterday, there were rumors that Krugman stated that it would have been stimulative if the earthquake […]
read more...That seems like a joke question, but it’s an apparently serious belief of Bruce Bartlett, a former supply-sider and Bush Administration official who has flipped sides and joined the left. I’ve known Bruce for decades and he’s a fun guy to hang out with, but he’s gone hard left in recent years, pimping for a […]
read more...It gets my blood boiling that the crowd in Washington is talking about raising our taxes when the budget is so riddled with excess spending. Here are two stories that illustrate the waste, fraud, and abuse that is pervasive in the federal budget. Our first example is about unemployment benefits fraud. I’ve noted on several […]
read more...How was anything ever invented before government started “investing” in new technologies? One wonders these things, given the seriousness with which Keynesians seem to believe that if they don’t choose the economic winners and then throw large sums of money at them – other people’s money, of course – then there will be no innovation […]
read more...Even though he’s become rather partisan in recent years, I still enjoy an occasional visit to Andrew Sullivan’s blog. But I was rather amused last night when I read one of his posts, in which he was discussing whether government spending helps or hurts economic performance. He took the view that a bigger public sector […]
read more...Ben Bernanke is definitely trying hard to overtake Arthur Burns and G. William Miller (those wonderful guys who helped give us the 1970s) as the worst Fed Chairman of the modern era. But unlike Burns and Miller, who “earned” their poor reputations with bad monetary policy, Bernanke is trying to cement his place in history […]
read more...Larry Summers served as Chairman of the National Economic Council for Barack Obama, so it is rather remarkable that he is admitting that the economy is in deep trouble and that America may be on the verge of long-term, Japanese-style stagnation. Here’s part of what he wrote. From the first quarter of 2006 to the […]
read more...Based on this morning’s numbers, I’ve updated my chart showing what the Obama Administration said would happen with the so-called stimulus compared to what actually has happened. As you can see, the unemployment rate is about 2.5 percentage points higher than the White House claimed it would be at this point. Since I just did […]
read more...It would not surprise most Americans to hear that unemployment rates are still lingering lower than pre-recession levels. As Dennis Cauchon wrote last week in USA Today: The nation has 5% fewer jobs today — a loss of 7 million — than it did when the recession began in December 2007. That is by far […]
read more...The Labor Department released its latest job numbers today and they remind me of Clint Eastwood’s 1966 classic, “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.” The good news is that the economy created 244,000 new jobs, the biggest gain in almost one year. And the jobs were in the productive sector of the economy rather […]
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