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March 1 (Bloomberg) — The U.S. Transportation Department will lay off 2,000 employees today, halting construction projects, reimbursements to state governments and highway safety programs, according to a statement.
Employees will be furloughed without pay because a funding measure stalled in Congress, the department said in a statement today. The affected workers are in the Federal [...]
Somehow Comptroller of the Currency John Dugan didn’t get the message from Team Obama about encouraging consumers to spend. As you know the Administration’s economic advisers see vigorous consumer spending as the solution for overcoming our recession. Consumer spending formerly represented 70% of the economy.
Apparently the consumers are getting the message without Mr. Dugan’s help since personal savings [...]
Here is the complete conversation I, the not-famous Econophile, had with the famous Martin Wolf, much lauded and awarded dean of economics writers and chief economics correspondent for the Financial Times. This is our second exchange and I have to admit I enjoy them. He drives me nuts, but I very much respect [...]
Martin Wolf, dean of economic writers and chief economics correspondent for the Financial Times, is a confirmed Keynesian. He’s also a very bright guy so I like to read his stuff. Occasionally I correspond with him and that is fun. I think he takes me for being a conservative.
His piece today in [...]
This is yet another very clever, funny, and well done music video. You’ll enjoy it.
Hat tip to Dano.
Even the Congressional Budget Office is conceding that things aren’t turning out as expected:
The Congressional Budget Office hiked its forecast Tuesday for how much the stimulus bill will add to the nation’s deficit, raising its estimate by $75 billion to $862 billion.
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, passed in February 2009, was initially believed to [...]
More from Cato’s Dan Mitchell on Keynesian stimulus. It is an excellent recap of the promises and failures of the current economy.
I disagree with his conclusion that we are almost certain to recover in 2010.
I have previously written about the phenomenon that regardless of what the Obama Administration does, economies tend to repair themselves. Evidence [...]
President Obama used his bully pulpit on Thursday to chastise banks and bankers while announcing a punitive tax on them to assuage an angry populace. Is his rage against the big paydays justified? Not for the reasons he [...]
This has been a phenomenal year for the economy. There have been major, fundamental changes that will affect our lives for many years to come. I don’t see these changes as a good thing for the short or long term.
These changes are generational in that they don’t occur often and they will radically impact the [...]
By Jeff Harding.
Paul Samuelson died yesterday at the age of 94 as I am sure you have heard. He was very successful in his field, having won a Nobel in economics and his economics textbook, Economics: An Introductory Analysis, sold over 4 million copies. I used his textbook in Econ 101.
His contribution to economics was [...]
By Jeff Harding.
The new jobs bill negotiations are apparently getting under the skin of our politicians. As reported in the Wall Street Journal Wednesday, the Republicans and Democrats were rather testy with each other during a meeting with the President. Here’s part of their exchange:
Republicans pushed Mr. Obama to freeze federal spending, a plea the [...]
By Jeff Harding.
As my readers know, every so often I get fed up with what comes out of Washington (Our Nation’s Capital) and feel the need to vent. My recent irritation is a letter Christina Romer, the president of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, published in the Wall Street Journal.
The letter is an apologia for the economic policies [...]
Jeff Harding.
I don’t mean to keep picking on Japan. But, they are the textbook case of why Keynesian economics doesn’t work. Actually, now that I think about it, they are the textbook case of why Austrian free market economics works. I have set them up as the poster child for bad policies. They have had [...]
By Jeff Harding.
I have all this vitriol stored up from not being able to publish for two weeks and it needs to be spewed. I just read Foreign Policy magazine’s “The FP Top 100 Global Thinkers,” and it is worthy of my bile. Of all the crap I have to read every day to get [...]
By Jeff Harding.
In order to understand the present state of the U.S. economy you have to understand that there are two things happening at once. For the most part they are in conflict with each other, in that one track can negatively impact the other.
Lest I be accused of putting out conflicting information, there is evidence that [...]
By Jeff Harding.
The Obama Administration knows it didn’t “create or save” 640,000 jobs but they use the Big Lie to justify the huge waste of taxpayer dollars through the $787 billion American Reinvestment and Recovery Act of 2009. But on Friday the government says that it did:
… The new data come from information tens of [...]
By Jeff Harding.
Check out this report on the Obama Administration’s latest gift: free golf cart! This is from the Wall Street Journal. I really can’t add much to this.
We thought cash for clunkers was the ultimate waste of taxpayer money, but as usual we were too optimistic. Thanks to the federal tax credit to buy [...]
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