Political journalism naturally tends to dwell on the activities of those who hold the levers of power, but the biggest political story of 2017 was the resistance to Donald Trump. via Matt Yglesias at VOX: The political lesson of 2017: resistance works This is a must read.
Tag: yglesias
We’re witnessing the wholesale looting of America
Donald Trump’s Lies Versus Hillary Clinton’s Lies When Hillary Clinton gets pressed on her somewhat slippery answers about why exactly she decided to use an off-label email server, she ends up looking evasive. She looks and acts like a normal human being who’s been caught out in an embarrassing situation. She’s admitted that she did […]
The ‘decline’ of marriage isn’t a problem If every poor adult in America married another poor adult, in other words, we would see a significant drop in the poverty rate. Nobody’s actual income would have increased, of course, but through the magic of statistics we would achieve a significant win in the war on poverty.
Something economists thought was impossible is happening in Europe Something really weird is happening in Europe. Interest rates on a range of debt — mostly government bonds from countries like Denmark, Switzerland, and Germany but also corporate bonds from Nestlé and, briefly, Shell — have gone negative. And not just negative in fancy inflation-adjusted terms […]
Obama’s bank tax is a big idea that might actually get done – Vox What Obama proposed was a 0.07 percent tax on borrowing by America’s largest banks. The way this works is that banks with over $50 billion in assets (which is about 100 banks) would need to pay a 7 cent tax to […]
A $20 an hour minimum wage really would cost a lot of people their jobs The good news about Denmark is that their unemployment rate is only very slightly higher than the USA’s and was lower in the recent past. The Danish economy as a whole does a good job of keeping people employed, and […]
Over a million Hispanics turned white between the 2000 and 2010 Census about two million people switched from describing themselves as Hispanic members of “some other race” to being Hispanic members of the white race, while only about one million people switched in the other direction. I expect the trend to continue in the 2020 […]
Obamacare implementation went great and people love it None of this proves that the Affordable Care Act is a good law or that conservatives should love it. But it does prove that the Affordable Care Act is working just fine. When an initiative comes in ahead of schedule and below-cost, that’s called working. And the […]
Basic Economics Has a Liberal Bias People to the left of econ 101 will typically invoke the phrase “political economy” to explain why, for example, econ 101 underrates labor unions. Conversely those to the right of econ 101 will instead invoke the phrase “public choice” to explain why, for example, econ 101 overrates utility regulation. […]