Politics Roundtable
- Recent Entries
Josh Green today:
A Second Stimulus: It goes without saying--doesn't it?--that this morning's news that the White House will push a $200 billion plan for business tax cuts, coupled with its $50 billion proposal for research and development tax credits, $50 billion for infrastructure, and its $30 ...
Frank Newport
Parties Tied at 46% in Generic Ballot: PRINCETON, NJ -- Republicans and Democrats are tied at 46% among registered voters in Gallup's weekly tracking of congressional voting preferences...
National Review Online reports on its interview with Joe Miller, the Republican nominee for the Senate in Alaska. Among other things, Miller said he is keeping his beard.
Miller's comment reminded me of a story about former New Jersey Senator Jon Corzine. Supposedly, when the wealthy Corzine ...
Keynesians
Last time we ran through two types of recessions, “Keynesian” type and “monetarist” type—the one we saw in 2002 and the other we saw in 1982.
In a “Keynesian” downturn the fundamental financial excess demand in the economy is an excess demand for bonds: an excess of (planned) savings ...
Karl Smith accurately describes the economic situation, in measured, appropriate langauge:
Rome is Burning « Modeled Behavior: There is a critical point that I fear the commentariat is just not getting. In my darker moments I fear that some of my fellow economists aren’t getting it either ...
Peter Orszag writes for the New York Times. He goes off his Obama administration position, calling for only a two-year extension of the expiring Bush tax reductions, and for America to fight the recession now and fight the long-term deficit later.
I wish he had drawn a clearer distinction between ...
Now comes Time's Karl Vick (formerly of the Washington Post) to explain "Why Israel Doesn't Care About Peace," which is the title Times gives to Vick's cover story. (Some might take issue ...
Eleanor Roosevelt Roosevelt, My Day:
HYDE PARK, Friday—We had a picnic lunch yesterday for the second group of boys from the Woodstock, N. Y., National Youth Administration Project. These boys are learning quarrying, masonry work, stone carving and even the making of their own tools. I did not ...
Students of the work of Jimi Hendrix will recognize Barack Obama's complaint that "They treat me like a dog." It obviously derives from Hendrix's "Stone Free," the first song that Hendrix wrote after arriving in England in 1966. "Stone Free" was released as the B-side to "Hey ...
As I discussed here, the Tea Party Express released a poll last week showing that conservative Christine O'Donnell trails moderate Mike Castle in the Delaware Republican Senate primary by only 6 points among likely voters. The poll also shows that O'Donnell is only 2 points behind Rep. ...
A church in Florida is planning to burn copies of the Koran on September 11. That proposal has been widely condemned, and now General Petraeus has entered the fray, warning that such a protest by the church could endanger American servicemen:
The top US commander in Afghanistan said Monday ...
President Obama tried to go on the offensive today, delivering a hard-hitting campaign speech in Milwaukee. He was accompanied by a couple of Cabinet officers and welcomed several local organized labor officials to the Labor Day event. Senator Herb Kohl, who is not up for re-election this year, ...
From Slouching Towards Utopia:
Once the people—the adult, male, white people that is—had the vote, what were they going to do with it?
The coming of (male, white) democracy in the North Atlantic was all mixed up with the coming of modern industry—the move out of agriculture and into industrial ...
Mathew Garrahan:
UCLA business school to end public funding: A leading business school in the University of California system is preparing to forgo public funding amid increasing uncertainty about the state’s economic health and California’s ability to pay for higher education. The UCLA Anderson School of Management ...
Normal open market operations swap cash for short-term government bonds, and so affect the short, nominal, safe interest rate. But when the short, nominal safe interest rate is zero, central-bank open market operations are simply swapping one zero-interest safe government asset for another: it is hard to see why ...
Paul Krugman:
1938 in 2010: we weren’t supposed to find ourselves replaying the late 1930s. President Obama’s economists promised not to repeat the mistakes of 1937, when F.D.R. pulled back fiscal stimulus too soon. But by making his program ...
Matthew Yglesias:
Matthew Yglesias » Impediments to Rapid Recovery From Financial Crisis Are More Political Than Economic: I wrote yesterday that I think the Reinhardt & Reinhardt finding that economies in the wake of a financial crisis typically experience years of slow growth is evidence that such ...
September 6, 1940:
World War II Day-By-Day: Day 372: British aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal, battleships HMS Barham and HMS Resolution and 10 escort destroyers depart Gibraltar bound for Freetown, Sierra Leone, for refueling. They will join cruisers HMS Devonshire and HMAS Australia to cover landings at ...
What is unusual about this video footage from early in World War II, just made public after 70 years, is that it is in color. Both Churchill and King George VI make brief appearances:
The summer after my first year of graduate school I went back for the last extended time to my parents' home in Washington DC. Joe Pechman, IIRC, got me a desk at the Brookings Institution. And I spent the summer reading as widely as I could and having coffee ...
Lately there has been a spate of news stories attacking Americans as "Islamophobic," largely on the basis of opposition to the Ground Zero Mosque. Time, to cite just one example, did a cover story on this topic. Putting aside the merits of the term "Islamophobia," it seems ...
Fareed Zakaria:
Zakaria: Why America Overreacted to 9/11: Nine years after 9/11, can anyone doubt that Al Qaeda is simply not that deadly a threat? Since that gruesome day in 2001, once governments everywhere began serious countermeasures, Osama bin Laden’s terror network has been unable to launch ...
With a multiplier of 2, $50 billion in the first year is 0.3% on the unemployment rate--and it's not clear if we can ramp up an extra $50 billion of infrastructure spending in the first year.
Don't get me wrong: boosting federal infrastructure spending is almost certainly a very good ...
A Manager, courtesy of Conor Friedersdorf:
About My Job: The Businessman: A reader writes:
I work for one of the world's largest multinationals, in a position that makes my job description basically "business" - I work on issues touching finance, ...
Scott writes:
TheMoneyIllusion » A few of my mistakes: 9. I predicted that aggressive QE would raise long term interest rates, a view which seemed to be refuted by the response on T-bond yields to the March 2009 Fed QE announcement....
I’d like to talk ...
The Editor-in-Chief of the New Republic, Marty Peretz:
The New York Times Laments "A Sadly Wary Misunderstanding Of Muslim-Americans." But Really Is It "Sadly Wary" Or A "Misunderstanding" At All?: Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims. And among those Muslims led by the Imam Rauf ...
An Army colonel writes to comment on Paul's post "Must we be boy scouts?" He writes:
In your post you ask if military commanders are just now coming to the conclusion that fighting the enemy is more important that fighting corruption. As an officer with multiple tours in ...
Nolan Carroll was a star defensive back for the University of Maryland until last September, when his college football came to an end due to a horrific leg injury. Following the insertion of a metal rod into his leg, Carroll began a lenghy rehabilitation process, which caused ...
Jim Kessler, who worked for then-Rep. Charles Schumer in 1994, argues that the Democrats can survive the 2010 midterms "the Reagan" way - i.e., the way the Republicans survived in 1982. Most of his argument consists, though, of trying to convince us that the Dems have a much better ...
Courtsesy of TBogg:
Glenn Harlan Reynolds 11/04/2006:
On the other hand, it’s also true that if democracy can’t work in Iraq, then we should probably adopt a “more rubble, less trouble” approach to other countries in the region that threaten us. If a comparatively wealthy and secular Arab ...