All Hail the Corporatist in Chief

Any one who thinks the Democratic Party or the Democratic President represent the interests of the little guy in this country can’t be reading any newspapers. I’ve always thought that the Republican Party overly favored big business and was out to set up monopolies for all its cronies. It’s hard to believe anyone [...]

Who Holds Wall Street Accountable?

If your answer included any of number regulators or congress with its oversight duties or the traditional media with its watchdog of the public duties sorta answer, that would be a wrong answer. There were so many articles today about past and present Wall Street tomfoolery that I almost forgot [...]

Some times being Right doesn’t always make you Feel Good

You may remember back in January that I was not happy and very outspoken about the size of the Obama Stimulus plan. I was not impressed by the content or with the mix between tax cuts and direct government spending. You may recall that the Blue Dogs interminable resistance to do anything that might [...]

Losing Ground

Whatever AxelRahm and POTUS are doing, it’s not working. CNN reports that the majority of registered independents in the country now disapprove of how President Obama is doing his job.
A majority of independent voters disapprove of how Barack Obama’s handling his job as president, according to a new national poll.
Fifty-three percent of independents questioned in [...]

Borrowing a turn of Phrase …

Paul Krugman’s Saturday blog post takes a defensive tone with Marc Ambinder who once called Krugman and a group of other liberal thinkers “reflexively anti-Bush”. Krugman expected a better apology from Ambinder after it was confirmed by former Bush Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge that the White House did, in fact, play politics with [...]

I’m with him …

I have to say, I’m with my neighbor James Carville on this one … put a decent health care reform out there and let the Republicans kill it. I’ve said over and over that without a vital public option, it’s neither about the health care or the reform. It’s about the lobbyists and [...]

Enough is Enough!

Left Blogistan is alive with the sounds of open dissent. I can only say, it’s about time. Here’s a good example from TheHill.com aptly headed Obama picks fight with left on Health Reform. The news, however, is this fact. A public option is not a liberal option. It’s the option that [...]

We need a New Brain Trust

While the U.S. economy sputters, France and Germany appear to have exited their recessions and returned to modest growth during the spring. There’s been a distinctly different approach to macroeconomic policy taken by Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Nicolas Sarkozy and their respective finance ministers that deserve elucidation.
The French and German economies both grew [...]

It’s just a little bit of Policy Fail Repeating

When you let lobbyists make public policy, failure is an acceptable outcome. That’s because the point of the policy isn’t the public and isn’t necessarily doing what will work. The point of the policy is to enrich and perpetuate the entrenched interests. Every other possible goal becomes expendable including those that have to do [...]

Keyboard Cat plays off Okun’s Law

I’ve been teaching Okun’s Law in my principles level Macroeconomics courses since 1980. It’s been the policy rule of thumb since the Kennedy years on how much GDP needs to change to get a movement in the unemployment rate. Here’s the Wiki explanation which is as good as any.
In economics, [...]