Well this didn’t take long. At 8:30 this morning, Uncle Sam suddenly shrunk. Federal spending fell from 21.5 percent of gross domestic product to 20.8 percent, while taxes declined from 17.5 percent to 16.9 percent. To be clear, the government is spending and collecting just as much as it did yesterday. But we now know […]
Archive for July, 2013
Pointers
Posted by Tom Lindmark on July 31st, 2013
A couple things worth reading this morning. Avik Roy discusses the relationship of part-time employment and Obamacare. He thinks that it is pushing more people into part-time work but the article is balanced and examines the arguments against the hypothesis as well. Tyler Cowen references a FT article which points to a number of disturbing […]
The Case For A Detroit Bailout
Posted by Tom Lindmark on July 30th, 2013
The Financial Times gets to the crux of the Detroit debacle. The FT is overly picky about writers cutting and pasting parts of their articles, so reluctantly I’ll respect their wishes and summarize. Eventually the argument over the priority of pension and health care obligations is going to end up in the Supreme Court. The […]
Posted in government, pensions, Uncategorized 
Tags: Detroit Bankruptcy, public pensions 
No Comments »Obamacare Morphing: Past, Present And Future
Posted by Tom Lindmark on July 30th, 2013
If you believe this: Obamacare’s price tag has just gone up by $12 billion, due to the White House’s decision to delay the employer mandate until 2015. The vast majority of that increase ($10 billion) reflects a reduction in the penalties that the government would have collected from employers who did not comply with the […]
Is US Oil Production Topping Out?
Posted by Tom Lindmark on July 29th, 2013
According to conventional wisdom the US oil boom is moving the country towards energy independence and even has the Saudis shaking in their boots. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard reported on a dire warning by a leading Saudi businessman today. Saudi Arabia and the Opec oil states must wean their economies off energy exports immediately or spiral into […]
Who’s Supporting Whom For Fed Chairperson
Posted by Tom Lindmark on July 29th, 2013
The over-the-top punditry surrounding the choice of the next Fed chairperson is getting tiresome. Nevertheless, if you can’t get enough here’s a scorecard from the WSJ Real Time Economics Blog on who supports either Yellen or Summers. You can see from the tally that Yellen is the overwhelming choice which I take to mean that […]
Are We Really Past A Bubble Economy?
Posted by Tom Lindmark on July 28th, 2013
Suppose the real estate bubble didn’t really end, it just went into hibernation, or that the current stock market splurge is just a continuation of the dot-com phenomenon. I can hear you already saying, “Not a chance, we learned our lessons.” Well Robert Shiller has a few words of caution about the end of bubbles. […]
