Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category

More on the Bailout

Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008 by BH

Russell Roberts and Menzie Chin discuss the Paulson's plan on Minnesotta Public Radio (MPR). Here's Roberts on the role of Fannie and Freddie in our current crisis.  Here's Menzie Chinn on how far housing market prices still have to fall (hint: they're going down for a long while yet.)

The Surge

Monday, September 22nd, 2008 by BH

An interesting program evaluation. (HT)

Executive Compensation

Monday, September 22nd, 2008 by BH

I left work in a hurry today because I was running late for my regularly scheduled guitar lessons. As I ran up the creaky and aged stairs and smelled the musty mix of dust, guitars and old men, I heard a strange discussion. Instead of their normal jam session, these ...

What Will The Next Four Years be About?

Sunday, September 14th, 2008 by BH

Sorry, but there is no sustainable political/military power without economic power, and talking about one without the other is nonsense. Unless we make America the country most able to innovate, compete and win in the age of globalization, our leverage in the world will continue to slowly erode. Those are ...

Google-Yahoo Deal High Probability of Being Challenged

Monday, September 8th, 2008 by CJB

The Alley Insider has a nice piece on this.  The Justice Department has apparently hired Sandy Litvack to potentially take on Google in its advertising deal with Yahoo. On a side note, the Justice department hiring an outside lawyer...

MSNBC Coverage Shakeup

Sunday, September 7th, 2008 by CJB

MSNBC has decided to have David Greggory anchor election coverage, and he is replacing the volatile Keith Obermann and Chris Matthews.  I was just telling someone the other day about my surprise that MSNBC was having Keith Obermann be a "neutral" anchor on the convention coverage.  MSNBC made a strategic ...

Mandatory Withdrawal

Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008 by BH

A recent AP article, which I will not quote from, details growing resistance to a rule from the 1986 Tax Reform Act that requires individuals to withdraw money from some types of retirement accounts, like IRAs (technically I think all individual accounts short of the Roth IRA are subject to ...

Foreign Aid

Monday, September 1st, 2008 by BH

There's been a long-running debate about whether foreign aid contributes to economic growth and encourages develpment. The literature has mostly found little effect, and when there is an effect, it is usually the result of data mining. Now comes an even more pessimistic impact analysis of the WB and IMF. ...

Two Lawyers

Saturday, August 23rd, 2008 by BH

Biden is officially the VP nominee. This was a safe choice and Biden will appeal to many people on both sides of the aisle. More to come soon.

What’s the Opposite of “Markets in Everything?”

Thursday, August 21st, 2008 by BH

From ABC news: Call it a rite of passage: children by the roadside peddling their homemade goodies to adults who are more than eager to drop a few cents into a makeshift cashbox. But Katie and Sabrina Lewis' veggie stand, in the town of Clayton, Calif., where they sold homegrown watermelons ...

Google Reader - Politics

Thursday, August 21st, 2008 by BH

From the Google Reader Blog comes news, perhaps old news to many of you, that the team is offering a new site called Power Readers in Politics. The site contains news that political journalists and staff from both political campaigns share from their own reader files. Check it out. See ...

The Anticommons

Thursday, August 21st, 2008 by BH

In the New Yorker, James Surowiecki writes about The Gridlock Economy, a recent book by Columbia law professor Michael Heller. Heller's book is on my short list I intend to read soon.

Austan Goolsbee

Thursday, August 21st, 2008 by BH

Profiled in MIT's Technology Review (HT). The article contains a funny description of how Goolsbee and Obama met: "Obama opened the door, looked at me in bafflement, and said, 'Who are you?' I said, I'm Professor Goolsbee. Obama said, 'You can't be.'" He'd been expecting an older tweed-jacketed academic, not--as Goolsbee ...

Tax Nonsense

Thursday, August 14th, 2008 by BH

Jason Furman and Austan Goolsbee, the economic policy director and senior economic adviser, respectively, to Senator Obama are both great economists but have an odd op-ed in today's WSJ. They get off to a bad start early and it doesn't improve (WSJ):Even as Barack Obama proposes fiscally responsible tax reform ...

For the Common Good

Tuesday, August 12th, 2008 by BH

At the Opening Ceremony of the Olympics, we were treated to a lovely song by Lin Maoke (BBC): Wearing a red dress and pigtails, Lin Miaoke charmed a worldwide audience with a rendition of "Ode to the Motherland". But the singer was Yang Peiyi, who was not allowed to appear because ...

Yao Ming

Tuesday, August 12th, 2008 by BH

The Chinese government had monitored his birth because of the perfect physical and athletic genes of his parents, forever treating him as something of a science project. Yet there’s nothing robotic, nothing programmed, about him. He has such humanity, such a sense of grace and honor. Over time, you can ...

Inside China

Thursday, August 7th, 2008 by BH

Mark Purdy, a sports writer for the San Jose Mercury News spent two weeks in China prior to the Olympics. Sometimes it's better to get your news from people that don't cover politics day to day. Here's how he describes China: How about this: It's a little like being in ...

Obama-Pelosi?

Tuesday, July 29th, 2008 by BH

From yesterday's Roll Call (subscription required): Nanci Pelosi is riding high. Coming off a series of legislative wins — most recently last week, after President Bush backed off his veto threat on a Democrat-backed housing bill — and entering the homestretch of her first Congress as Speaker, the San Francisco Democrat ...

Environmental Alarmism

Thursday, July 24th, 2008 by BH

Enough books on environmental doom have been printed to kill off a forest of giant redwoods. That's Harvard economist Edward Glaeser reviewing Paul and Anne Ehrlich's new book, The Dominant Animal, in the New York Sun (NYS). For the most part he likes the book, just not their policy recommendations. For ...

More on Speculators

Saturday, July 12th, 2008 by BH

Tim Hartford says the more the merrier (Slate).