Musk vs Gore
DOGE? No, I’m jumping in the Wayback Machine and talking about the National Partnership for Reinventing Government (NPR)
Tagged: spending
RetConning the Tea Party
Whatever its genesis, a populist movement is always a populist movement, and they always end the same way.
McConnell: Trump Will Sign Bill, Declare National Emergency
There were some wondering if President Trump would sign the newly passed spending bill designed to avert government shutdown, or declare a national emergency for border funding. Apparently he will do both.
Meanwhile, Our Children Continue Their Undaunted Assault on Mammon…
I have a piece up at the Atlantic called “What’s Really Behind the Ever-Rising Cost of Raising a Child in America“. You should go read (and comment) there. To summarize: the cost of raising...
Another Country Club Republican Bites the Dust
This time it’s Sen. Dick Lugar [R-IN] getting the Tea Party ax in the primary. Dick Lugar is the type of Republican who Democrats love although seldom actually vote for. If you’ve got a...
Can a small target be easier to hit?
One of the occasional frustrations of debating policy is that it can be difficult to convey your views concisely and precisely. In the case of libertarianism one difficulty is defining exactly what you mean...
First Quarter 2012 GDP At 2.2%
News on the economy today and it’s looking increasingly like the happy surprises which characterized the end of 2011 and the beginning of 2012 were aberrations.
Why Are These Two Things Different?
At Rortybomb (which has migrated to Next New Deal), Mike Konczal takes arguments against lower rates on student loans to task. My only question is this: Are taxes owed to the U.S. government a kind...
Eating Peas
Fellow Ordinaries Elias Isquith and Mike Dwyer have fired the opening shots in our discussion about the latest budget proposal from that fiscal firebrand from Janesville, Paul Ryan, and Tod Kelly (who has just been...
The Future Is Now: The Birth Of The American Wasteland
A really interesting piece from the Times‘ Binyamin Appelbaum focuses on how parts of the country where the housing bubble was the most pronounced — and where there was historically nowhere near the same...
In Which I Posit the Theory that Fiscal Conservatives Should Vote for a Democrat POTUS – (and government spending advocates should vote GOP)
One of the inevitable election-year pundit cliches that always makes me cringe is this response to any accurate criticism of either party’s lack of promised execution: “Yeah, but it would be so much worse...
A Better Way To Do Campaign Finance Reform
~by Dan Miller Elias wrote a great post about campaign finance reform, and I think it raised some important issues. But I think this discussion–like most discussions of campaign finance–missed a key point. Many people believe...
Waste and Abuse
So, we’ve just narrowly averted — do we avert things in any other way? — we’ve just narrowly averted yet another government shutdown. I can’t help but feel that the magic is gone, and...
We Need Countercyclical Spending, Not Counterintuitive Spending Cuts
Matt Yglesias points out once again that since we can borrow money at basically negative real interest rates, we should do it. We should do it to stimulate the economy, put money into infrastructure...
All Deficits and No Jobs Make Homer Something Something
Deficits don’t matter during a recession. We should be running deficits during a recession. We should be running deficits when there is little to no inflation. We should be running deficits when unemployment is...
Cutting Jobs Instead of Bombs
I don’t understand our political leaders. They’re so interested in cutting spending on healthcare and retirement – even the Democratic president is eager to start hacking away at entitlements – yet almost none of...
Immigration, Inequality and Pie
Tim Lee has an excellent response up to this post by NRO’s Daniel Foster, who writes: Punishing a minor by removing him from the culture he’s adopted as his own, for the crimes of...
The Price of Loyalty
Brad DeLong calls The Economist’s profile of Mitch Daniels, “A beat sweetener so sweet as to send us all into hyperglycemic collapse.” He continues: When Mitch Daniels was in a position of power and...
the things people say
Riffing off my last post, I’d like to take on two thoughts. First, here’s Yglesias:
Nothing’s ever certain except race and taxes.
Andrew Sullivan has this map posted at the Dish today, which he found via Open Left. What I take from Open Left’s analysis is that by and large white men are not all that progressive....
