I awoke this morning in my Birmingham, Mich., hotel room to the dulcet tones of my old friend Jamie Samuelsen (I used to babysit the guy!) talking about the interminable Les-Miles-Michigan saga on his WDFN radio sports call-in show. Then he moved on to an article in Tuesday’s Detroit Free Press about how the Red [...]

I’ve got to admit that I really have no opinion whatsoever on the adequacy or inadequacy of the Fed’s quarter-point rate cut (clearly I have no future in monetary policymaking). But it is interesting that the rate cut and its size were pretty much what recent Fed economic forecasts and pronouncements by Fed officials had [...]

I was in the airport this morning about to catch a flight to Detroit when I saw the big headline in the FT: “Putin favours liberal as successor.” Interesting, I thought. Then I saw the headline in the WSJ, which didn’t say anything about Dmitri Medvedev being a liberal: “Putin Chooses Young Loyalist as Successor.” [...]

Mark “Economist’s View” Thoma was appalled by my statement in this post that, “Some tax cuts do raise revenues, of course.” So much so that he took back a bunch of nice things he’d just said about my column on Arthur Laffer. Chastened at having so disappointed the alarmingly prolific man from Eugene, I briefly [...]

My column this week is about the persistence of the Republican canard that tax cuts raise revenues. Some tax cuts do raise revenues, of course, and many others deliver economic benefits that offset some of their cost. But it has apparently become required of Republican politicians at the national level that they speak as if [...]

My new column is in the issue of Time with an empty-pocketed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on the cover and online here. It begins: If there’s one thing that Republican politicians agree on, it’s that slashing taxes brings the government more money. “You cut taxes, and the tax revenues increase,” President Bush said in a speech last [...]

You may have heard the argument that YouTube is totally over, meaning either that Google was stupid to spend $1.65 billion on it last year or at that being subsumed by giant Google has doused the raucous YouTube magic. I was first struck by the idea when I read Jeffrey O’Brien’s great piece in Fortune [...]

Ben Stein wasn’t all wrong about Goldman Sachs. Yeah, the “humble hypothesis” in his NYT column on Sunday that Goldman economist Jan Hatzius’s bearish stance on the housing market “was a device to help along the goal of success at bearish trades in this sector and in the market generally” was typical half-baked Steinian nonsense. [...]

Weighing in (at great length) on the debate between the Edwards and Obama campaigns over whether health insurance should be mandatory, Maggie Mahar makes a nice clear case for why if you want affordable health insurance to be available to everybody then you have to require that everybody buys it: If we want community rating, [...]