Author: Dave

This sums up perfectly what virtually no one on the left understands about the Tea Party. The feuding between business groups and Tea Party Republicans is just beginning. Trade associations and conservative groups that clashed bitterly over the government shutdown and the debt-ceiling hike will soon be on opposite sides in fights over the U.S.…

Listen to the markets.

Glenn links Taranto, who says this about Iraq: No philosophical breakthroughs have occurred over the past decade to render the moral and legal justifications for the war untenable in retrospect. Thus the only test it can be said to have failed is an empirical one: that things turned out badly. To say so may seem…

This year that means freedom even from getting citations for smoking marijuana in public. The City Council hasn’t yet made that a ticketable offense. So police officers may issue warnings along with free snacks. They’re handing out free Doritos bearing a link to more information on what’s allowed, and what’s not, under I-502. ***  They said…

First they decide Obamacare doesn’t really have to be implemented if the GOP and Democrats agree it doesn’t .  Then they decide they can exempt their staff from its legal requirements. Congress is  no longer a body of legislators, they’re a council of rulers. Now, Treasury is getting creative, joining the parade of abuses at…

Very good post from Tyler Cowen, and some great links: Paul Krugman has covered this topic a few times lately, most recently here.  For instance he writes: The main point, however, is that we are a very long way from classic monetarism, of the form that says that the central bank can control broad monetary aggregates…

That is an outrageous injustice that cries out for redress. There are only two possible remedies. This column favors the fiscally responsible solution: abolishing the Women’s Bureau. The alternative would at least double our supply of comic material, but everyone has to make sacrifices. …  Other than Krugman, I know of no reasons why the…

This is what a modern lynching looks like.  In the age of “three felonies a day,” setting up a tipline to try to generate a federal case for prosecution of the crime of… whatever…  just because you don’t like the verdict of a jury, is a gross violation of Zimmerman’s constitutional rights, particularly the 14th.  The thousands of death threats…

It’s all going to be Republicans’ fault. This administration just never stops politicking.  Their universe is defined by politics.  Politics raises the sun, politics moves the stars, by golly politics creates the quantum-mechanical Gamow window that allows stellar fusion to happen in the first place.  That’s why the IRS went teabagger hunting, State didn’t want…

Scott Sumner notes decreasing hostility to the notion of monetary stimulus on the left, with Martin Wolf’s latest post as Exhibit A: As you’d expect, Martin Wolf’snew piece in the NYR of Books ends up in a suitably ecumenical fashion: The right approach to a crisis of this kind is to use everything: policies that…

John Cochrane argues that our darned political system is just not up the challenges of the economic times. He makes some excellent points re Reinhart and Rogoff, but unfortunately he makes a profound error is his assumptions: …fiscal stimulus is essential when conventional monetary policy is powerless… Monetary policy is never, ever powerless. A central…

After a couple decades of near-zero growth, Japan finally elected a government that promised to get the hell out of the so-called “liquidity trap” (low growth coupled with low interest rates) by raising the inflation target from 1% to 2%.  Did it work?  Well… Lars Christensen: This is yet another very strong prove that monetary…

Over the past couple years I’ve gradually become a convert to a collection of ideas called market monetarism (MM), which espouses the notion we should do away with inflation targets and replace them with a nominal GDP level target (NGPLT, for short).  They seem to explain the current economic conditions better than Keynesian “liquidity trap” or…

Tim Blair notices this Waleed Aly cornucopia of nonsense, complete with a refreshingly honest graphical admission the media can’t wait for a Tea Party member to finally do something violent. It’s a target-rich environment, but this bit jumped out at me: It’s not just that we don’t value Iraqi lives as much as American ones (although…

He doesn’t seem to know much history, either.  Racism wasn’t so much a Southern trait as a Democrat trait, and it doesn’t require any particular contortions to understand turn-of-the-century progressivism was synonymous with racism. So I posted a couple comments pointing out the Democrat strategy has always been to garner as many votes as they…

Progress! Polis’ measure would regulate marijuana the way the federal government handles alcohol: In states that legalize pot, growers would have to obtain a federal permit. Oversight of marijuana would be removed from the Drug Enforcement Administration and given to the newly renamed Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Marijuana and Firearms, and it would remain illegal…

Glenn further advances his outstanding notion of a post-gov’t-employment tax, aka the “Reynolds Surtax“.  Some people, especially those with a lot to lose (e.g. gov’t officials, lobbyists, and those they regulate)  are going to call this a gimmick, but it’s really something that should be taken very seriously — when DC is the only non-fracking…

Great article here on “A Capitalism for the People: Recapturing the Lost Genius of American Prosperity” by Luigi Zingales,  esp the Pigouvian angle. It was also heartening to read the other day that some at the Fed are arguing for the end of TBTF — the revolving door between regulators and regulated has gotten so…

This speaks for itself, really: Hundreds gathered at Seattle Center for a New Year’s Eve-style countdown to 12 a.m., when the legalization measure passed by voters last month took effect. When the clock struck, they cheered and sparked up in unison. … Officers will be advising people not to smoke in public, police spokesman Jonah…

Interesting news from Zhongguo: Party leaders will no longer be greeted wherever they go with cheering crowds, banners, red carpets and elaborate flower displays, said a statement on Chinese state media after a meeting of the new 25-man Politburo. The updated rules also ban dull, long speeches and fawning write-ups in the state newspapers, as…