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Category Archives: Economics

Uber uber alles?

Wednesday, December 7, 2016

There is nothing I like more than having my own preconceptions validated, so I direct your attention to a series of articles (now concluded) at Naked Capitalism about Uber. I’ve always detested Uber, because every fiber of my being believed it was simply a device to shift money from the bottom to the top. Taxi […]

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Running in place, and other observations

Saturday, August 6, 2016

“Now here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!” Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass This quote came to mind when I stumbled on this post by Wolf Richter, […]

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Trade talk

Sunday, July 3, 2016

A diarist at Kos asks what the fact that Trump is “running to the left” of Hillary on the TPP means. I found this post interesting for a number of reasons. First, opposition to the TPP is not necessarily a “left” position. If it is, it is a position in which the left and right […]

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Why we really need the TPP

Monday, June 27, 2016

Shouldn’t this have been front page news: On June 24, foreign oil company TransCanada filed a lawsuit against the U.S. under NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, arguing that the U.S. rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline violated NAFTA’s broad rights for foreign investors by thwarting the company’s “expectations.” As compensation, TransCanada is demanding […]

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Brexit

Monday, June 27, 2016

The Brexit vote is all over the news, at least it was a day or so ago, and there are no end of explanations to why the British voted the way they did. It was a fairly unique situation. The right had reasons to support an exit, given the anti-immigrant posturing of some of the […]

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Impressive stupidity

Friday, May 27, 2016

Ask yourself, is there a tax break that benefits the rich that is so overwhelmingly stupid that even the Oklahoma legislature would repeal it? Believe it or not, the answer is yes. Last week, the Oklahoma legislature sent Gov. Mary Fallin a bill—at her request—eliminating just such a break: a state income tax deduction for […]

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Doctors, Lawyers, and the 1%

Thursday, March 10, 2016

I’m a big fan of Dean Baker, but there’s one point he makes repeatedly upon which I beg to differ somewhat. His post today alludes to the issue: Hey, can an experienced doctor from Germany show up and start practicing in New York next week? Since the answer is no, we can say that we […]

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Economics made easy

Wednesday, March 2, 2016

The folks, alas a “bipartisan” group, supporting the Trans Pacific Partnership have been touting a “study” by the Peterson Institute for International Economics that purports to show that everything will be rosy if we ultimately pass the treaty. We have a prejorative term in the legal profession that is applied to some judges. (Scalia comes […]

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Something happening here, what it is…

Tuesday, February 9, 2016

Well, you know the rest of the song, provided you’re over 60. Anyway, while the media is focused on which little Hitler will get the Republican nomination, the banks (remember them) appear to be headed for another crash. Here’s Krugman: While we obsess over domestic politics — not that there’s anything wrong with that, since […]

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Seven Stages

Thursday, January 28, 2016

Glenn Greenwald traces the Seven Stages of Establishment Backlash, demonstrated completely in the case of Jeremy Corbyn in Britain, and in process here in the U.S. in the case of Bernie Sanders. Other than the numerical quantities, there isn’t much parallel with the Seven Stages of Grief, particularly at stage 7. In the case of […]

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