Stuff We Missed: Wednesday, February 22 http://t.co/2qxa9hTA
14 minutes ago
United States Channel: Latest Posts
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United States
Corporations Don’t Need a Tax Cut, So Why Is Obama Proposing One?
The Obama administration is proposing to lower corporate taxes from the current 35 percent to 28 percent for most companies and to 25 percent for manufacturers. The move is supposed to be “revenue neutral” – meaning the Administration is also proposing to close assorted corporate tax loopholes to offset the lost revenues. One such loophole [...]
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Great Leap Forward
Yes, Virginia, Foreclosure Is Theft
There’s a lot of pushback anytime someone points the finger at banks. As I’ve argued for a couple of years now, virtually all recent foreclosures really amount to theft. The banks have no legal standing to take homes. They created the MERS monster, which destroyed the chain of title and “lost” all the documents. That [...]
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United States
The GOP’s Big Investors
Have you heard of William Dore, Foster Friess, Sheldon Adelson, Harold Simmons, Peter Thiel, or Bruce Kovner? If not, let me introduce them to you. They’re running for the Republican nomination for president. I know, I know. You think Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, and Mitt Romney are running. They are – but only [...]
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Finance & Markets
The Gas Wars
Nothing drives voter sentiment like the price of gas – now averaging $3.56 a gallon, up 30 cents from the start of the year. It’s already hit $4 in some places. The last time gas topped $4 was 2008. And nothing energizes Republicans like rising energy prices. Last week House Speaker John Boehner told Republicans [...]
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United States
The 2012 Economic Report of the President
Markups, Competitiveness, and the Bush Tax Cuts and Deficits The Administration released the annual Economic Report of the President on Friday. Many topics were covered, but here I’ll remark upon a few issues, motivated by several graphs. First is price markup over unit labor cost. The interesting trend since 2001 has been the rise in [...]
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United States
Michael Olenick: Shocking Economic Insight – Mass Foreclosures Will Drive Down Home Prices
By Michael Olenick, creator of FindtheFraud, a crowd sourced foreclosure document review system (still in alpha). You can follow him on Twitter at @michael_olenick or read his blog, Seeing Through Data “A lie told often enough becomes the truth.” – Vladimir Lenin, adopted and reused by Joseph Goebbels Every doctor knows the fastest way to [...]
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United States
Christina Romer: We Need a Regime Change at the Fed
Christina Romer does the Five Books interview and one of her recommended reads is a famous article by Peter Temin and Barry Wigmore titled “The End of One Big Deflation.” This is a great choice since it shows that even in a “balance sheet recession” facing a binding zero percent lower bound, monetary policy can [...]
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United States
Shifting the Center of the Political Debate
I want to follow up on Paul Krugman’s post about the shifting Overton window in the UK toward the political right (think of the Overton window as a view into the center of a debate). As Krugman would be the first to tell you, it’s not just in the UK. For example, consider the current [...]
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United States
Health-Care Costs and Climate Change
k That’s the average global temperature from 1998 through 2008, according to NASA. This, of course, is what enabled George Will to write, in 2009, “according to the U.N. World Meteorological Organization, there has been no recorded global warming for more than a decade.” Of course, George Will is just a run-of-the-mill climate change denier [...]
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United States
Manufacturing Illusions
Suddenly, manufacturing is back – at least on the election trail. But don’t be fooled. The real issue isn’t how to get manufacturing back. It’s how to get good jobs and good wages back. They aren’t at all the same thing. Republicans have become born-again champions of American manufacturing. This may have something to do [...]
