Class War at the New York Times!
So Paul Krugman got a little pink in his latest column: The austerity agenda looks a lot like a simple expression of upper-class preferences, wrapped in a facade of academic rigor. What the top 1...
Tagged: Austerity
The Other Half of New York City
For anyone living in New York City, or even vaguely familiar with the city and its mayor, this is not surprising news. But it’s still unwelcome: The rise in New York City’s poverty rate...
On Reinhart and Rogoff
As Nob deftly noted, there was big news on Tuesday as an influential 2010 study by professors Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff was found, to put it lightly, to be deeply flawed. The paper’s conclusions...
Eric Cantor’s Plan to Save the GOP
Ron Fournier of National Journal is following Eric Cantor around as the House Majority Leader terrifies DC’s infants (“Eric Cantor grabs a plastic dinosaur from the pile of toys in front of 1-year-old Mekhi Scott, taps...
John Boehner: Liked but Not Well-Liked
National Review‘s Robert Costa has a behind-the-scenes report on Speaker Boehner’s failed effort to get his caucus to pass his “Plan B,” an entirely political, ultimately feeble attempt to confuse the issue and insulate Republicans from incurring...
The Grand Bargain, Revisited
Before describing himself as “agonizing” over whether to support it or not, Paul Krugman tries to distill the pro/con of the latest potential Grand Bargain: So is what Obama gets out of this — basically unemployment...
About Today’s Fiscal Cliff Trial Balloon
Note: Such are things right now that writing about the fiscal cliff struck me as a welcome diversion. Ezra Klein is the White House’s favorite young journalist, so he’s been the guy when it comes to...
Note to Fix the Debt: Your Class Interest’s Showing
I guess the Fix the Debt folks are worried that their decades-long quest to roll back the New Deal and lower their own taxes is in peril, because they’re responding now to a Matt...
Election 2012 Wasn’t Close. Here’s Why It Matters.
Note: Here’s a post that I began some time ago and that is increasingly losing relevancy as post-election developments multiply. But it ended up being rather long and, frankly, the idea of having spent...
Stimulus first, austerity later
Via Alex Tabarrok, a recent study by Richard Evans, Laurence Kotiloff, and Kerk Philips at VoxEU examines the effects of long-term large-scale redistribution of young Americans’ savings to the elderly: [T]he young, because they...
Riots, left and right
The critique of the riots and neoliberalism that Elias links to below reminds me quite a bit of Theodore Dalyrmple’s piece in City Journal, and this piece in The Australian. Perhaps individualism cannot really...
Hayekian Stimulus
If you watch this Hayek vs. Keynes rap again, you’ll notice that very rarely throughout are the two men actually disagreeing with one another. They’re largely talking past one another, with Keynes speaking directly to...
Stocks collapse, threaten to go even lower than our opinion of Congress
Here’s Krugman: It’s not the whole story, but something like this threatens to develop: 1. US debt is downgraded, sparking demands for more ill-advised fiscal austerity 2. Fears that this austerity will depress the...
Playing games with the deficit
“To the extent that Washington is "broken" (and I’d argue it’s less broken than some suggest) it’s because it suffers from being, unusually, both fat and musclebound. No wonder it finds it difficult to...
You say austerity, I say prosperity
Reactions to New Jersey governor, Chris Christie’s cuts and privatizations are mixed depending on where you fall on the ideological spectrum. But one thing that irks me is the reaction that all these spending...
Auserity Measures
Via National Review, here’s an interesting article on Lithuania’s belt-tightening response to the financial crisis: Faced with rising deficits that threatened to bankrupt the country, Lithuania cut public spending by 30 percent — including slashing...
