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Category Archives: Economics

This makes too much sense to ever happen

Sunday, March 12, 2023

I’m a big fan of economist Dean Baker, who used to have a blog called Beat the Press, but is now behind a Patreon paywall. I’m a subscriber, and I thought I’d pass along the gist of his latest, as I think it makes a whole lot of sense, which is precisely why what he […]

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A transatlantic myth

Sunday, November 27, 2022

I ran across this article in my news feed today. It’s from the British newspaper, the Guardian. The title is what drew me to read it: Competence, what competence? Tory chancellors like Jeremy Hunt always spell disaster British politics are a lot like US Politics these days, with the Tory party becoming more and more […]

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Ponzi, updated

Wednesday, June 8, 2022

I admit that I have never been able to understand cryptocurrency. The idea that one can create value by wasting electricity and/or solving mathematical problems that no one cares about escapes me. Even an NFT is at least a sort of a thing, which one gets in exchange for one’s money, though I find it […]

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Dean Baker has a modest proposal

Saturday, August 14, 2021

Sometimes you read something, and it strikes you at once that the writer’s point is obvious, and that it will still come to nothing. So it is with this article by Dean Baker, in which he urges the Fed to do and publish research on the likely effects of climate change on the United States […]

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Sounds familiar

Wednesday, September 16, 2020

A few weeks back I “reviewed” Kurt Andersen’s book, Evil Geniuses, about the long game played by the American right to take over our political system. The increase in inequality was a prominent part of the book. I made the point in my post that Andersen didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know, but […]

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Gilded Age, part 2

Tuesday, May 8, 2018

A few days ago, I said I’d be putting up a series of posts comparing our present Age of Corruption, Plutocracy and Kakistocracy to the Gilded Age. Herewith, installment two. Back around the 80s, the Republican Party began promoting itself as the party of new ideas. The ideas seemed to consist of inventive ways to […]

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A % here and a % there and pretty soon you’re talking about real money

Sunday, November 19, 2017

It goes without saying that Paul Ryan and the Republicans are lying when they claim their tax bill is designed to benefit the middle class. Okay, some of them may not be lying. Some of them may be so stupid that they believe the bullshit Ryan is peddling but, same difference. If you’re a Member […]

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Redistribution, Republican style

Sunday, May 28, 2017

Dean Baker sets the record straight about the Republican’s alleged aversion to redistribution: Matt O’Brien’s Wonkblog piece might have misled readers on Republicans views on the role of government. O’Brien argued that the reason that the Republicans have such a hard time designing a workable health care plan is: “Republicans are philosophically opposed to redistribution, […]

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An idea whose time has long since come

Tuesday, May 23, 2017

I read about this several years ago, and unless my aging mind is letting me down, I wrote a post or two about it, at or around the time when the bankers destroyed the economy: Across the country, community activists, mayors, city council members, and more are waking up to the power and the promise […]

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Market forces

Sunday, April 30, 2017

Surely anyone reading this blog has read a lot of stories making this basic point: There’s a reason that Donald Trump didn’t have a crowd of wind power workers standing behind him at his rallies, and it goes beyond just his disdain for windmills off the coast of his Scottish golf course. The reason is […]

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