Bradford DeLong posted a vicious rant on his blog recently accusing the signatories of a letter in support of President Trump’s economic policies of being “both 100% cynical and 100% deluded” as well as “moronic and easily grifted.” However, it turns out that Delong himself suffers from the delusion that a president gets to write and pass legislation exactly as he sees fit.
Eric Posner and Gen Weyl claim that economics has become too timid. Posner is an influential law professor at Chicago, and Weyl is a principal researcher at Microsoft. Their article appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education on May 6. Their diagnosis of economics is accurate, but their cure is worse than the disease.
Various assumptions employed by mainstream economists appear to be of an arbitrary nature. The assumptions seem to be detached from the real world.
A recent announcement by a local transit authority in Virginia sheds light on how the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) are building a massive, intrusive surveillance network built on America’s transportation system.
In the Senate Intelligence Committee secret vote today on whether to confirm Trump nominee Gina Haspel as chief of the CIA, she will likely again be praised for promising to “speak truth to power.” This has recently become one of the favorite accolades in the least trusted city in America. But will Americans be as gullible this time around?
Last month, we reported that money-supply growth accelerated for the first time after a year-long period of falling growth rates, at the end of which money-supply growth fell to a near-ten-year low of 2.6 percent, year over year.
In March of this year growth rates had headed upward, rising to a year-over-year growth rate of 5.1 percent.
In April, however, growth rates lessened again, coming in at a rate of 4.3 percent, year over year.
Many economists who subscribe to some version of the Phillips Curve have been puzzled by the tepid nominal wage growth in recent years, even though the official unemployment rate has collapsed and we should be in “overheating” territory at this point.
According to the Census Bureau, household formation in 2017 fell to the lowest levels seen since 2010. In 2017, total households in the United States grew 0.32 percent, which was only slightly above the historic low of 0.30 in 2010, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.
Last year I noted that America would benefit from Trump acting more like Putin - at least in terms of military spending. After all, while Trump and Republicans were pushing for a $80 billion increase in the defense war budget, Putin’s government had reduced their’s to a total of around $50 billion.
Jeff Deist joined the Tom Woods Show yesterday to discuss whether the term “Libertarian” is still useful.
To quote Tom Woods, “This one’s a doozy, my friends.”
