I get this weird feeling that I’ve seen this before. Wapo: President Obama’s economic advisers and outside experts say the nation’s much-celebrated housing rebound is leaving too many people behind, including young people looking to buy their first homes and individuals with credit records weakened by the recession. In response, administration officials say they are […]

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Thomas Sowell on the politics of enacting budget cuts: Back in my teaching days, many years ago, one of the things I liked to ask the class to consider was this: Imagine a government agency with only two tasks: (1) building statues of Benedict Arnold and (2) providing life-saving medications to children. If this agency’s […]

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All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others. Occupy Wall Street’s General Assembly operates under a revolutionary “progressive stack.” A normal “stack” means those who wish to speak get in line. A progressive stack encourages women and traditionally marginalized groups speak before men, especially white men. This is something that has been […]

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Reason on Standard and Poors’ downgrading of US Credit today: Fiscal denialists thought we could just keep getting away with having some of the worst finances in the developed world. That dream should now be over. Full story here.

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The Times finally runs an opinion column finally worth printing. Money quote: Last week, in his address on deficit reduction, the president followed the playbook once again. In the throat-clearing section of the speech, Obama promised “tough choices” that put “everything on the table.” But his tax proposals were aptly summarized by The Atlantic’s Clive […]

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Who could have guessed that raising taxes to punitive levels doesn’t change behavior, but leads people to the black market? Le Times: Itinerant cigarette vendors have long been a fixture in some parts of the city, like bodegas that sell individual cigarettes in violation of state law. But with cigarette prices up and the number […]

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TPM on Ryan’s medicare overhaul proposal: In trying to dismantle Medicare, Republicans are seeing to rollback a successful example of single payer toward freer market. I don’t think that word means what you think it means.

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The Wall Street Journal on Obama’s “debt reduction” speech: Mr. Obama did not deign to propose an alternative to rival Mr. Ryan’s plan, even as he categorically rejected all its reform ideas, repeatedly vilifying them as essentially un-American. “Their vision is less about reducing the deficit than it is about changing the basic social compact […]

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Reason on Obama’s word trickery: Tellingly, The New York Times defines “tax expenditures” as “payments to taxpayers for deductions for charitable donations or home mortgages,” as if letting people keep more of their own money is the same as giving them subsidies.* The Times notes that “the use of the phrase ‘tax expenditures’ allows the […]

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Via The Guardian concerning budgetocalypse: Some economists and political scientists also raise what they see as the danger of Republican cuts slowing or even reversing America’s climb out off recession. Thomas Ferguson, professor of politics at the University of Massachusetts, said there was a danger of repeating the mistakes of the Great Depression by chopping […]

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