Walt: Does Obama owe us a more complete explanation of what the U.S. is doing in Syria? http://t.co/avpwIuoLX0
12 minutes ago
-
Corporate Taxes: Don’t Beat Up on Apple: The Flaw is in the Law
This week it was the turn of Apple’s Chief Executive Tim Cook to sit in the Congressional hot seat. With lights blazing and cameras rolling, a bipartisan lineup of Senators grilled him about the relatively small amount of tax the company pays on its substantial corporate profits. According to a New York Times account of [...]
-
People are Drawing the Wrong Lesson from the IRS 501(c)(4) Scandal: We Need to Rethink the Whole Concept of Tax-Exempt Organizations
President Obama is shocked and angered that the IRS targeted certain conservative organizations for special scrutiny when they applied for 501(c)(4) tax exemptions as “social welfare” organizations. Republicans are just as shocked. The whole Washington political establishment is shocked, just shocked, that anyone, let alone the IRS, would try to stem the flow of political [...]
-
US CPI Falls in April at Fastest Rate since 2008. Even so, could it be Overstating the True Rate of Inflation?
According to data released yesterday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. Consumer Price Index fell in April at an annual rate of -4.35 percent. It was the second consecutive monthly decrease and the fastest rate of decrease since late 2008, when the economy was in free fall. The April decrease was largely attributable [...]
-
The Eurozone’s Woes in One Big Chart
The latest data from Eurostat shows that fewer than half of the eurozone’s economies are now growing. Real GDP in the EZ as a whole was 0.4 percent lower in the first quarter of 2013 than a year earlier. The worst news came from the bloc’s biggest economies: Germany’s growth fell from 0.7 percent Y-o-Y [...]
-
Arguments against Exporting Natural Gas Don’t Add Up
The energy policy topic of the week is whether to export more of America’s newly abundant natural gas. Like any good card-carrying economist, my instincts favor free trade. Other things being equal, that makes me pro-export. Still, shouldn’t we listen to what the other side has to say? Maybe gas is different. Maybe exporting it [...]
-
US Unemployment Rate Falls to 7.5 Percent, Strong Upward Revisions for Job Growth
The report on the U.S. employment situation for April released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics contained some good news, with the unemployment rate falling to 7.5 percent, its lowest since late 2008. Payroll jobs rose by a better than expected 165,000, and upward revisions to previous months made job market performance for the [...]
-
Is the Chained CPI the Right Fix for Social Security?
One of the most controversial elements of President Obama’s 2014 budget is the proposal to reduce future cost-of-living adjustments to Social Security benefits by changing the inflation index. The Social Security Administration now bases inflation adjustments to on the consumer price index for urban wage earners and clerical workers (CPI-W), a close cousin of the [...]
-
US GDP Growth Accelerates from a Crawl to a Walk in Q1
US GDP growth accelerated from a crawl to a walk in the first quarter of 2013, according to the advance estimate issued today by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The reported annual growth rate of 2.5 percent was just a bit faster than the average rate during the recovery, and much stronger than the 0.4 [...]
-
Slovenia Is Not The Next Cyprus, but That Doesn’t Mean It’s Not in Trouble
Leo Tolstoy wrote that all happy families are alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Much the same is true of economies. Maybe that was what EU Commission President Jose Barosso had in mind when he said recently that, “it is a completely different situation in Cyprus and in Slovenia.” Different, [...]
-
A Disappointing, Procyclical, and Highly Politicized Budget
The White House has officially unveiled its budget for fiscal year 2014. I hope to have a chance to look at some of the numbers and programs in depth over the coming weeks, but the overview alone confirms what many leaks have suggested, namely, that this is a disappointing, highly politicized document. Here are some [...]
