The Red White and Blue Pill
The truth about the Fast and Furious scandal
A Fortune investigation reveals that the ATF never intentionally allowed guns to fall into the hands of Mexican drug cartels. How the world came to believe just the opposite is a tale of rivalry, murder, and political bloodlust.
Worth a read. The ATF, while clearly not 100% in the clear here is not guilty of what the GOP is claiming.
‘America’s violation of international human rights abets our enemies and alienates our friends.’ – Jimmy Carter Jimmy Carter: US Foreign Policy Since 9/11 Has Been ‘Catastrophic’ for Global Human Rights | Common Dreams
David Brooks Says That Mitt Romney and the Republicans Are Not Very Good at Arithmetic
Greece, Spain, and Italy have among the least developed welfare states in Europe. If someone wants to make an argument that there is some inherent problem with the welfare state model then we should look for crises in Sweden, Denmark and Germany, all states with far more generous welfare states than these Mediterranean countries. In fact, the welfare states of northern Europe are doing relatively well through the crisis, it is difficult to understand how anyone can look at the pattern of the crisis across Europe and conclude that it implies that the welfare state model has reached its end.
Dean Baker make a really good point that no one on the right will listen to. And most certainly not Mr. Brooks. But this is the kicker:
If the U.S. paid the same amount per person for health care as Denmark, Germany, or Sweden we would be looking at massive budget surpluses.
If you just look at the numbers, a better welfare state model would put us in a much better economic situation. Not that anyone on the right would consider such a thing.
Greg Mankiw’s Blog: I inspire a contest
That is very helpful. Thanks! I am always trying to find mistakes, omissions, and ambiguities in the book so I can improve the next edition. I look forward to seeing what they come up with.
Post-Keynesian MMT folks pick a fight with Mankiw and Mankiw thanks them. I’m calling round one for Mankiw.
Devaluation Is Austerity Done Right
Currency devaluation is best understood not as an alternative to austerity, but as the correct way for a debt-burdened society to implement austerity.
Why did Iceland recover and Ireland get worse? Iceland had a currency to debase. And they debased their currency enough to reset the economy and grow again. Three cheers for currency debasement. Ireland on the other hand, couldn’t debase the Euro. Like a nation on a gold standard, they had no way to make monetary policy changes to get the economy moving.
So if austerity works, shouldn’t it be the other way around? A stagnant Iceland and a booming Ireland?
House GOP Blocking Abortion Access for Raped Soldiers
if an Army medic serving in Afghanistan is raped and becomes pregnant, she can’t use her military health plan to pay for an abortion. If she does decide to get an abortion, she will have to pay for it with her own money. And if she can’t prove she was raped—which is difficult before an investigation is completed—she may have to look for services off base, which can be dangerous or impossible in many parts of the world.
Wow. This is just cruel.
Reagan, not Obama, was the big spender. While there was a brief burst of government spending early in the Obama administration — mainly for emergency aid programs like unemployment insurance and food stamps — that burst is long past. Indeed, at this point, government spending is falling fast, with real per capita spending falling over the past year at a rate not seen since the demobilization that followed the Korean War. Why was government spending much stronger under Reagan than in the current slump? “Weaponized Keynesianism” — Reagan’s big military buildup — played some role. But the big difference was real per capita spending at the state and local level, which continued to rise under Reagan but has fallen significantly this time around.
… if you want to see government responding to economic hard times with the “tax and spend” policies conservatives always denounce, you should look to the Reagan era — not the Obama years.
The current GOP is so far removed from the GOP under Reagan it is almost unrecognizable.
Taxi Medallions: How New York’s terrible taxi system makes fares higher and drivers poorer
When New York’s Taxi and Limousine Commission held a public hearing last week to consider whether to raise taxi fares by 20 percent, cabdrivers pled poverty and passengers argued that fares are too high. Paradoxically, both groups were right.
This lose-lose scenario is only possible under the taxi medallion system, a regulatory scheme in which the right to operate a taxi is thoroughly divorced from the actual work of driving one. It’s a classic example of the perils of financialization, the process through which economic potential is turned into a liquid and leveraged asset. By converting a portion of cabbies’ future revenue into a freely tradable asset, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and a host of other cities have created a powerful investor class, medallion owners and financiers, whose interests routinely compete with those of drivers and passengers.
Financialization also makes what should be a trivial deregulation nearly impossible as it would make the Medallion owners very upset. They would be willing to spend big bucks to prevent any attempt at deregulation.
Economic Theory Doesn’t Say That Small Business Owners Maximize Profits
to the best of my knowledge there is no economic theory that says small business owners maximize profits. Think about it from a workers’ perspective. People who work on commercial fishing operations earn a lot more money than most people with comparable levels of education. But nobody thinks it defies economic theory that America’s retail clerks don’t quit their jobs en masse to go fishing. Commercial fishing is dangerous and you have to live on a boat. All else being equal, people prefer to earn more money but they also prefer to do safe work and have the opportunity to socialize. What economic theory says is that workers maximize utility and therefore employers who want to get workers to do something that’s unusually dangerous or unusually unpleasant will have to pay a premium. A small business operator is in the same situation. She’s balancing income against other lifestyle factors, including the hours put in on the job, the pleasantness of the work, the sense of self-esteem that comes from having something to do, possibly a sentimental attachment to a particular location or certain employees. What economic theory says is that a profit maximizing small business person has to be someone with a very unusual utility function.
This can not be repeated enough. Small businesses rarely behave the way politicians describe.
Conservatives seem to believe that the rich will work harder if we give them more, and the poor will work harder if we give them less. Can this campaign be constructive? – The Washington Post