J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 2225

Scoring the PPACA

Bruce Bartlett has a very good catch:

The Untold Medicare Improvement: My Fiscal Times column today looks at the latest Medicare trustees report. It shows an enormous improvement in Medicare’s finances due to passage of the Affordable Health Care Act. Oddly, the Obama administration seems reluctant to take credit for this improvement, apparently because an accompanying memo from Medicare’s actuaries predicted that Congress would increase payments to health care providers. What everyone...

is a Bond Bubble Even Conceivable?

Spencer of Angry Bear says not:

BOND BUBBLE?: Many are talking about the bond market being the latest bubble. But it looks more like the press is just seeing bubbles everywhere. To me a bubble happens when everyone starts believing something that probably is not true... that the long term earnings growth of the S&P 500 was shifting up.... In the 2000's bankers and home owners came to believe that housing prices could never fall so that homeowners could always refinance their...

Estimated Monthly GDP Is Declining...

David Beckworth looks at the estimates from Macro Advisers:

Macro and Other Market Musings: How Low Must It Go?: I was shocked to see the outright decline in May and June. Let's be clear what this development means: total current dollar spending declined during May and June in the U.S. economy.  And most likely it continued to fall in July and August given the weak economic outlook.

Paul Krugman Tells Us to Go Read Konczal and Jayadev

Krugman:

Expansionary Austerity?: In a terrific new working paper, MIke Konczal and Arjun Jayadev look under the hood of an Alesina/Ardagna paper that is being widely cited as evidence that austerity will lead to growth. They look to see how many of the austerity -> growth episodes actually involve fiscal contraction in a slump. Here’s a comprehensive list of those cases:

Ireland 1987

And as I among others have noted, the things that drove Irish expansion — devaluation, a boom...

Michelle Boorstein and Her Editors Are Another Reason We Would All Be Better Off If the Washington Post Shut Down Tomorrow

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Intellectual garbage collection outsourced to Eric Boehlert:

Is it "colorful" to call Obama an anti-Semite?

Am I the Only Person in the World Who Remembers That the World Trade Center Was a Work of Islamic Architecture?

Laurie Kerr:

http://www.slate.com/id/2060207: The Mosque to Commerce:Bin Laden's special complaint with the World Trade Center: We all know the basic reasons why Osama Bin Laden chose to attack the World Trade Center, out of all the buildings in New York. Its towers were the two tallest in the city, synonymous with its skyline. They were richly stocked with potential victims. And as the complex's name declared, it was designed to be a center of American and global commerce. But Bin...

Matthew Yglesias's Solution to the Mike Allen Problem

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps? Yglesias says that we can:

Yglesias: People Should Talk on the Record! Earlier this week, the Treasury Department invited some bloggers... to meet briefly with Secretary Geithner and I guess some other officials.... Mike Allen... given the ground rules, likewise offered a writeup that didn't feature specific names or quotes... a "mind-meld"... that Tim Fernholz and other more policy-minded people who were there said was substantially...

Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps?

Yes, Jeffrey "Toilet Training" Goldberg appears really upset at the distribution of his emails. Glenn Greenwald:

"Retraction": Last night, I emailed Goldberg, told him I intended to write about this....  He responded by acknowledging that no such thing had happened and apologized gracefully enough ("You're right, I'm wrong. My apologies"), but then -- assuming I'd be writing about this -- went to his blog... ("I mistakenly said that I thought Greenwald had retracted a particularly...

Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps?

In which I am reminded of why we call the Washington Post's Susan Schmidt "Steno Sue"...

David Kurtz today, August 20, 2010:

BFF: Tom Delay: "Jack Abramoff is still a friend of mine."

Steno Sue, December 29, 2005:

DeLay, a Christian conservative, did not quite know what to make of Abramoff, who wore a beard and a yarmulke. They forged political ties, but the two men never became personally close, according to associates of both men...

Steno Sue, October 18...

Winston Churchill Liveblogs World War II: August 20, 1940

Winston Churchill:

In the House of Commons: The gratitude of every home... goes out to the British airmen who, undaunted by odds, unwearied in their constant challenge and mortal danger, are turning the tide of the world war by their prowess and by their devotion. Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.

All hearts go out to the fighter pilots, whose brilliant actions we see with our own eyes day after day; but we must never forget that all...