The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Failure Is Not a Public-Relations Problem: The Brutal Economics of ObamaCare

“Obama: Anatomy of a World Leader,” by Alex Gray (detail) The Congressional Budget Office report about the economic impact of ObamaCare is out, and it paints an ugly picture. The Hill: The new healthcare law will slow economic growth over the next decade, costing the nation about 2.5 million jobs and contributing to a $1 […]

This Should Not Be Necessary

Headline at Patterico: No, Extending Unemployment Benefits Does Not “Create Jobs” The basic economics of this should be obvious — it’s simple common sense — but ignorance of basic economics is rampant and common sense is increasingly rare, and so Patterico feels obliged to rebut this fallacy promoted by You Know Who: “Voting for extending […]

Carts and Horses, Causes and Effects

Complex causation in human behavior means that social science often isn’t very scientific. Not every variable can be measured with such accuracy as, for example, annual income and years of education, and things which are not measured tend to be neglected as factors in social science. Researchers don’t usually find correlations by accident, and they […]

Take Paul Krugman’s Money

Paul Krugman tediously rehashes his “economic inequality” gripes: The reality of rising American inequality is stark. Since the late 1970s real wages for the bottom half of the work force have stagnated or fallen, while the incomes of the top 1 percent have nearly quadrupled (and the incomes of the top 0.1 percent have risen […]

In Which @NYTimeskrugman Exposes His Own Structural Stupidity

Yesterday I praised Kevin D. Williamson’s elegant account of poverty in Appalachia, but of course the liberal know-it-all Paul Krugman couldn’t resist adding his two cents of Nobel Prize ignorance: My take on Williamson’s report . . . is that it basically says that William Julius Wilson was right. Wilson famously argued that the social […]

Matt Yglesias: Solving Non-Problems

Slate.com has become a journalistic ghetto, an “Amateur Online Webzine Specializing in Hit-Trolling and Outrage-Fishing,” as Ace calls it, and their “business and economics correspondent” (?) Matt Yglesias gets in the spirit with a 415-word item under this headline: Why Taxing the Rich Is Great Yglesias quotes one sentence from a New York Times article: […]

Welcome Our New Robot Overlords

As if Instapundit’s weird enthusiasm for “robosexuality” weren’t disturbing enough, now there’s this prediction from two MIT geeks:  Technological progress is going to leave behind some people, perhaps even a lot of people, as it races ahead. . . . [T]here’s never been a better time to be a worker with special skills or the […]

Taxpayers Lose $10.5 Billion on UAW Bailout; Does @DavidCookTFP Care?

Before we talk about @DavidCookTFP — a liberal columnist for the Chattanooga Times Free Press — let’s talk about Detroit, the city driven into bankruptcy by Democrats and organized labor. If there is one sentence which should be indelibly etched in your mind about President Obama’s bailout of General Motors, it is this: “GM was […]

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