Monday Morning News and Views

Good Morning, Conflucians! This morning more than ever, I’m so grateful for all of you, and so glad we have this blog where we can discuss, argue and rant about politics and news events. I can’t begin to imagine what I would have done with out TC and all of you Conflucians over [...]

Common Sense and the sensus communis: anatomy of an American pressure cooker

Gay-Lussac
The pressure of a fixed mass and fixed volume of a gas is directly proportional to the gas’s temperature.
This relationship is known as the Gay-Lussac’s Law and a pressure cooker is an example of the law in practice. Cooking under pressure creates the possibility of cooking with high temperature liquids because the boiling point of [...]

When Deficits Matter …

There’s a lot of misunderstanding in popular culture (most started during the Reagan years) about deficit spending and the public debt.  Deficits tend to increase naturally during bad economic times due to what we economists call automatic stabilizers.  These are spending programs (most of which were built into the economy during the New Deal) 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 by [...]

He’s No FDR

With the release of financial regulation reform and healthcare reform that has Wall Street breaking open the bubbly, I just want to join the chorus of highly skeptical economists.  The tune of the last few days is hard to miss.  Take this piece from the NY Time’s Dealbook as an example:  Only a Hint of [...]

We own our votes

As Booman immolates himself in conflagration of Kool-aid fueled stoopidity, one of the asinine assertions he has made is that Obama won the popular vote in last year’s primaries. As evidence for this claim he cites this page at RealClearPolitics showing at the very top that Obama received 17,535,458 votes (48.1%) and Hillary received [...]

The Chicago School v. The Rest of Us

There’s a very big debate between economists that’s beginning to spill on to the pages of major newspapers.  Suddenly, people that I usually only read in scholarly articles are attending conferences where they give papers in what passes off more as the lessons of theory and empirical evidence instead of the theory and evidence itself [...]

Flim Flam Men: My Mathphobic Tour of the Econ Blogs

In his New York Times column today, Paul Krugman writes that with the epic financial meltdown and the administration’s response, the U.S. has now tarnished it’s reputation as
the unquestioned leader of the global crisis response. That leadership role was only partly based on American wealth; it also, to an important degree, reflected America’s stature [...]

Obama’s 60 Minutes Interview and that Odd, Inappropriate Laughter

It

“Don’t expect too much from me,” says the POTUS

I’m just lucky that I still have some Tums handy:
From Yahoo News/AP

Obama seeks patience, warns of expecting too much
LOS ANGELES – Facing largely adoring crowds far from Washington, President Barack Obama on Thursday asked Americans to back his far-reaching economic and health policies, but warned them not to expect too much from him or the [...]