krebscycle

  • The Greek debt crisis in short story form.

    Once upon a time, a small, poor and poorly run country called Greece borrowed a whole lot of money, most of it from giant banks in Northern Europe, although some also went to banks in Spain. The weaknesses in the Greek economy were well known and the corruption of its…

  • Dear Jon Chait: 2+2 is not equal to 5.

    Jon Chait wrote: “conservatism is geared toward localism and views national-level government as inherently more oppressive.” Is it true that conservatism is based on this view? The conservative Bush administration doubled the size of the Federal Government, authorized torture, pushed through the vast expansion of Federal police powers in the…

  • Rhetoric 101 and President Obama

    Obama’s famous speech in which he says there are no red states, no blue states, just the United States,  and his other pleas for unity are incessantly derided by people who appear not to have basic language skills. Here’s the last paragraph of President Lincoln’s speech at his first inaugural.…

  • The Economists you have, not the ones you want

    Thomas Sargent won the Nobel Prize in economics for works based on mathematical models which supposedly provide a scientific basis for understanding how real economies work. One widely cited paper on the causes and cures of South American hyperinflation includes near the beginning a claim to have identified two points…

  • eccentric-opinion: clawsofpropinquity: If (‘if’) the title to a plot of land was obtained by the driving off or the killing or the enslaving of its inhabitants, no amount of buying and selling will launder that title and transform it into a moral claim; the system as it exists can… Libertarianism…

  • Against anti-neoliberalism

    [Published 2014] Anti-neoliberalism has become the ideology of the nostalgia left – mostly white guys who miss the Imaginary 1970s. In the Imaginary 1970s, Che berets were cool, FDR’s New Deal had Wall Street Tamed, the White Working Class was Union Strong and Pro-Big-Government,  Regulators were not Captive, the Rule…

  • Explainer: The Obama debt

    Surplus of $128 billion in 2001. The last Clinton budget. Deficit of $1.4 TRILLION in 2009. The last GW Bush budget. Deficit of $457 billion in 2017. The last Obama budget. Where did the money go? When Obama took office the last Bush budget left him with  $150B year over…

  • Counterinsurgency and raping children: a success story

    Gian Gentile: In COIN, a precondition for success is the existence of a legitimate government. The United States has one success in the history of counterinsurgency since WW II to its credit: it succeeded in assisting the legitimate government of El Salvador defeat an internal communist insurgency. However, it was…

  • Dean Bakers silly and politically backwards bailout falsehood

    Finally, Sorkin again makes the annoying assertion on the AIG bailout that, “we got our money back — with more than $22 billion in profit.” This one deserves derision. Access to liquidity back in 2008-2009 carried an enormous premium. We gave $192 billion to AIG at a time when other…

  • The bureaucracy of the US Government: DOD Example

      Report: Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction This quarter, I must once again reiterate my concerns about the policies of the U.S. Army’s suspension and debarment program. As I have pointed out in our last six quarterly reports, the Army’s refusal to suspend or debar supporters of the insurgency…