Asymptosis: Always Approaching

Category: Economics

  • Are Tea Partiers Copping a Clue? Paul Ryan Gets Booed

    Paul Ryan Gets Booed By Constituents For Opposing Tax Hikes On Rich (VIDEO) | TPMDC. Related posts: “Anybody else have a question besides this guy?” What’s Wrong with Vouchers? Neoclassical economists don’t understand neoclassical economics Damn this guy sounds like me Bring Back the Philosopher Kings

  • It’s “Obviously” a Spending Problem

    Well, unless “obvious” means “conforming to reality.” Here just the latest: I don’t think I have to draw the trend line for you, or point out that the U.S. spends less than every thriving, prosperous country but two. Update: Way less. To spend is to owe? « Consider the Evidence. Related posts: Is Big Government…

  • “Anybody else have a question besides this guy?”

    PAWLENTY: I like Paul Ryan’s plan directionally. I don’t think it’s fully filled out in terms of the fact that we still have to address Social Security and when we issue our plan later in this process, it will have some differences[…] VOLSKY: Do you support the Medicare cuts in his plan that he keeps…

  • Weimar, Zimbabwe, Here We Come

    Or maybe not. Megan McArdle invokes one of the two standard bogeymen to suggest — classic fallacy of the extremes — that It Could Happen To Us. And I cannot disagree too strongly with the notion that the US can’t default because we can always print money.  It isn’t even technically true–Zimbabwe eventually ran out of…

  • If You’re in New York, Run Don’t Walk: Starts This Morning

    And if you’re dweebishly interested in this subject like I am. 20th Annual Hyman P. Minsky Conference on the State of the US and World Economies I just heard about this, and only because my daughter was recently admitted to Bard. (Their Levy Economics Institute is running the event.) This event appears to be free.…

  • What’s Wrong with Vouchers?

    James Kwak explains why Paul Ryan’s notion for vouchers replacing Medicare doesn’t work: If you are forty years old and healthy now, you simply cannot insure yourself against the risk that you will be uninsurably unhealthy when you are sixty-five. You retire, and you lose your health insurance. But you’ll have vouchers, right? You can use them…

  • “You Deserve It” Part 243

    John, born in 1973, decided to get married, buy a house, and start a family in 2003. James, born in 1976, decided to get married, buy a house, and start a family in 2006. In 2009, both John and James were laid off. Both were offered jobs in another state. John sold his house at…

  • Intolerable Socialism

    Best line of the week (with a couple of elisions by moi): Any effort to reduce government spending on health care … is intolerable socialism, and any effort to increase government spending on health care … is also intolerable socialism. via Yglesias » Making Sense of the Rationing Switcheroo. Related posts: The Problem with “Socialism”…

  • If You Regulate Us, We Won’t Provide Liquidity!

    Providing Liquidity: The evolution of the SOES bandits in the 1990’s into DATEK, ISLD, NSDQ, and finally Big HFT firms who run ahead of your orders. You bid $21.04, six of them bid $21.05 and take stock up to $21.18. This automated sludge is now somehow Providing Liquidity, because it has been repeated often enough.…

  • Too Big to Fail? Wall Street and Main Street: How Big Are They?

    Crossposted at Angry Bear. People are forever talking about banks that are too big to fail. But you rarely hear about the larger issue: The financial industry is too big to fail. (Click for larger graphic.) Note that “Main Street” here includes government expenditures — 20% of the total. Remove those, and Wall Street money flow…

  • Christina Romer Gets It Right. Mostly.

    I’ve been highly skeptical of Christina Romer’s thinking since she came out with that egregiously poorly-reasoned paper (PDF) that got so much play a couple of years ago. But her NYT “Economic View” piece today seems cogent, lucid, and well-supported to me. Basically: the emperors of theory-driven, sky-is-falling inflation hysteria are not wearing any clothing.…

  • Ah: The Republicans Banned Earmarks!

    How Budget Battles Go Without the Earmarks – NYTimes.com. This good news. But it’s badly reported good news. Misrepresentative, and more importantly, it’s not a good explanation of what happened, which is the basic purpose of news reporting. Here’s the letter I wrote to the reporter: Re: “The wall finally tumbled down this year when…

  • What’s Wrong with this Picture?

    Public-sector collective bargaining is unhealthy and distorts democracy because it enables workers to influence the government which negotiates with them; but Unlimited and secret corporate political campaign contributions are necessary to democracy because they enable corporations to influence the government which regulates them. And I would add, “that negotiates with them over what those regulations should be.” via New…

  • “one of the most elemental human rights–the right to belong to a free trade union”

    Now who do you think said that? And when? http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=43110 Related posts: Largest Oil Spills You Gotta Give Reagan Credit Politicians Should Resist Equality and Prosperity! No, the Greeks Aren’t Lazy. The Germans Are. Reveal Your Preferences! Show Your Support for Accounting-Based Economic Modeling

  • Do Unions Kill Prosperity?

    You hear from lots of people — including lots of economists — that they do. Because they’re monopolistic price-fixers, they distort economic decisions and make us all worse off. The theory makes sense, as far as it goes. But if it were really true you’d expect to see it in the data. Not so much:…

  • Do We Need More Doctors?

    Since the rapidly rising cost of health care services is basically the only thing that matters in the whole government budget discussion, I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. One frequent assertion is that the limited supply of doctors (because of semi-monopolistic medical-school, licensing, and immigration policies) is a big contributing factor. So when…

  • Embarrassed Republicans Admit They’ve Been Thinking Of Eisenhower Whole Time They’ve Been Praising Reagan

    “When I heard about Eisenhower’s presidential accomplishments–holding down the national debt, keeping inflation in check, and fighting for balanced budgets–it hit me that we’d clearly gotten their names mixed up at some point,” Priebus told reporters. “I couldn’t believe we’d been associating terms like ‘visionary,’ ‘principled,’ and ‘bold’ with President Reagan. That wasn’t him at…

  • The Best Line of the Week…

    Is actually from thirty years ago. Speaking of Social Security: “It’s not the third rail,” cautioned Ken Khachigian, a speechwriter for Reagan, “until you touch it.” 30 years of deficit talk, but little to show for it | Deseret News/New York Times News Service Related posts: Mea Culpa: Rivlin-Domenici Needs Work Who’s Fiscally Responsible? Koch…

  • Is This Person Liberal or Conservative? In One Question.

    The OK Trends blog on the OK Cupid dating site is pretty amazing. They pull all their hundreds of millions of pieces of data and suss out amazing facts about how people are, and how they interact. Here’s a beaut re: politics and ideology (Jonathan Haidt, take note): The Best Questions For A First Date…

  • Say it Ain’t So!

    Hands over ears, eyes closed, humming loudly. (Hey, it always works for me.) During a private commission meeting last week, all four Republicans voted in favor of banning the phrases “Wall Street” and “shadow banking” and the words “interconnection” and “deregulation” from the panels final report, according to a person familiar with the matter and…

  • Government Investment and the Post-70s Prosperity Gap

    Does this look like a smoking gun to you? To me, at least, it looks like a very likely contributor to the stagnation of prosperity growth that we’ve seen since the 70s. This is fed, state, local spending combined. I’ve cut off the top and bottom to concentrate on the post-war period, and because earlier…