Yes, I am trying to drive traffic these days. Why do you ask? I can’t help beating up on the president, thanks to his new proclamation on “carbon pollution”—that is to say, pollution that is not pollution—because the new regs the president is pushing are intended to reduce the emission of carbon dioxide, which does…
Search Results for: ECONOMIC GROWTH
Larry Summers so very smart and Larry Summers not so very smart
Larry Summers, star-crossed former president of Harvard and, more recently, head of President Obama’s National Economic Council, has written an excellent review of Thomas Piketty’s endlessly reviewed (even by me) best seller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, praising Piketty for both his timing (publishing a massively researched book on inequality when the topic is all…
Manhattan Institute dude gets War on Poverty half right, most of the time
Scott Winship, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, home of the cop-loving, Sarah Palin-hating Heather MacDonald* and various other assorted right-leaning, tea-sipping double-domes, has a piece in the current Politico magazine that, shockingly concludes, “despite the alarm of the current debate about America’s poor, the country has actually reduced poverty more than we often appreciate—and…
Big Picture Bullshit
Apostate Republican David Frum and apostate jerk* Robert Samuelson both back the camera up from the current fray di DC to give us the big picture. Says Frum: Why are American politicians playing so rough? We have moved into an era of scarcity. Once it seemed possible to have the spending Democrats wanted, financed at…
Judith Shulevitz, so not a scientist
Judith Shulevitz, crackerjack gal o’ many opinions at the New Republic, has a piece in the print version of the Oct. 21issue (which I’ll link to as soon as it’s online) deploring the failure of the recent “36-page summary of a report about to come out from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change” to…
Compared to what?
There have been endless columns and discussions about our slow recovery from the Great Recession, and our recovery has been slow and the recession was great, and we should be doing better, and I take the Krugmanesque position that a bigger stimulus package would have left us in better shape, but. Yes, but. But why…
Data Manipulation 101: Matt Yglesias Edition
I agree with Matt Yglesias about 60% of the time, which, for me, is pretty high. But Matt, like so many liberals, is particularly hot on the issue of global warming, which is one place where we part company. In a recent post, “Natural Resource Scarcity Is a Real Thing,” Matt posts the following graph…
Krauthammer doubles to right
As the few who read this blog know, there are few people I dislike more than arch neo-con Charles Krauthammer. But, as a stopped clock is right twice a day, so Krauthammer is right twice a decade. In a recent column, he whales away mightily at President Obama’s Second Inaugural, accusing the President of “clinging…
Let me tell you about the very rich. They are very different from you and me. They’re totally obnoxious
Chrystia Freeland has scored big time with her portrait of complaining plutocrats in this week’s New Yorker, focusing on Leon Cooperman, an amiable, sort of, billionaire who compulsively refers to President Obama as “a man who never worked a day in his life”—because, according to Cooperman, if you’ve never run your own business, you’ve never…
Bad History Week at Robert Samuelson’s
There was a time—in the early days of the Clinton Administration, perhaps—when Robert Samuelson’s column on economics was worth reading, on a consistent basis. But the times, well, they changed a long time ago. Recently, Bob took note of the fact that, economically, things are pretty shitty these days, and the only people with a…