Nancy Folbre, an economics professor at UMass Amherst, e-mails with a couple good criticisms of my “Don’t Ditch the GDP” column: First, no economist that I know of, either on or off the Sarkozy Commission, has advocated ditching GDP. What’s under discussion is the possibility of developing good supplements to it. Second, the viability of [...]
I’m a little late to this (it came out on Tuesday), but I just read Newt Gingrich’s “Plea to Republicans: It’s Time for Real Change to Avoid Real Disaster.” It starts with a cogent analysis of just how bad things look for Republicans in this fall’s Congressional elections. “The Republican brand has been so badly [...]
A certain Flip has declared that my post from last week about the Congressional Budget Office and capital gains taxes contained the “Worst Argument of the Day.” I’m totally honored, except that I didn’t actually make the argument for which he condemns me, which was that the decline in tax revenue from 2000 to 2004 [...]
The new Four Seasons Mumbai has just opened its doors. And as the FT reports, (via the Indian Economy Blog), it wasn’t easy getting to this point: Property analysts estimate there is a shortage of 100,000 hotel rooms in India – more than the existing supply. Archaic restrictions that have prohibited the construction of high-rise [...]
Bill Carter at the New York Times reports that NBC is launching a 24-hour local news channel in New York, which will subsume the network’s current local news operation. Local news audiences are “eroding and aging” (the words of John Wallace, NBC’s newly christened president of local media) and the way broadcasts currently work is [...]
In March 1980, Lester Brown wrote a paper for his Worldwatch Institute titled “Food or Fuel: New Competition for the World’s Cropland.” Let’s just say it turned out to be a bit premature. “I was so far ahead of the curve no one even knows that exists,” Brown says. (It is still on sale for [...]
Fresh off his rousing defense of the McCain-Clinton gas tax pander (it’s better than price controls), my future co-author Bryan Caplan now makes a more general case for why his fellow objectivists/anarchists should consider voting for Hillary Clinton: In terms of policy, Hillary and Obama look extremely similar to me; I prefer either to McCain [...]
Yes, it’s true, I do have a magazine story to write, but first I must share this video of CNBC’s Becky Quick interviewing Warren Buffett. This is like day 226 of CNBC’s Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting blitz coverage. I tried to keep up, really I did. Becky starts off by saying that after more than [...]
Yeah, yeah, I know: Microsoft backs off and Yahoo’s stock implodes! Countrywide turns out to be maybe not worth anything! The Fed says lending standards are tightening a lot! Some guy named Paul Collier writes a really smart blog comment! So much fun news to blog about. But I’ve got a magazine story to write. [...]
The Congressional Budget Office issued a report Friday on Sources of the Growth and Decline in Individual Income Tax Revenues Since 1994. The gist of it was that the big gains in federal tax revenue from 1994-2000 had very little to do with changes in the tax code, while about half of the decline in [...]
