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 tax cuts …

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 year. Keeping

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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 a few weeks ago about the “Paypal …

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. (If …

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, Edwards and

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There’s a major business battle brewing in Congress that’s been getting hardly any mainstream press coverage (well, here’s something, but it took me a while to find it). On one side are the nation’s four big railroads, which have been operating at close to capacity and making a lot of money lately. On the other side are their big …