Tom Bozzo In this round-up of "experts" (Cramer?!) on whether to "soak the Rich" at the WaPo (the title of which, given the actual Obama budget plans, reminds one that mainstream discourse has really lost sight of the true rich-soaking possibilities), what really bugged me was this from Laura D'Andr...

by Tom Bozzo Much like the largely if not totally hypothetical family farm that might need to be sold off to cruel agribusiness to pay "death taxes," I suspect that trotting out charities as the Real Victims of Obama administration plans to reduce tax expenditures on the wealthy is the latest Luntzi...

Tom Bozzo tips the hat to Ken and SvN for a pointer to a nice paper from the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking called "The Deficit Gamble," by Laurence Ball, Douglas Elmendorf (now CBO director), and N. Gregory Mankiw. Ball, Elmendorf, and Mankiw showed that the government can "with a high probab...

Tom Bozzo has observed EconomistMom Diane Lim Rogers run multiple items pertaining to claims that it's inappropriate to use deficit spending for longer-run public investments. I opine that such claims do not make a hell of a lot of sense. As Rogers is following basically Republican sources (the Wash...

A MacNN news item divines a possible merger of calendar and map functions on the iPhone from an Apple patent filing. My marginal propensity to consume Apple-branded electronics is at least as high as the next person's, but nevertheless if Apple is granted this patent then the USPTO is fundamentally ...

Atrios writes: I know we're in crazy economic times here, but it's still a bit weird seeing economists suggesting that our government get into the mortgage business at below market rates. I say the economic times are so crazy that I'll worry about getting a refi at "below market" rates when the mark...

Earlier in the year I reviewed the investments held by the Madison Cultural Arts District's trust fund, which once had been intended to use stock market returns (and later alternative investment returns) to pay the Overture Center's construction debt and contribute to the Center's operations. I conc...

It's a measure of how lousy the McCain campaign is that not turning in a Couric-level performance (but see) and instead pulling quasi-relevant talking points and zingers off of notecards is supposed to exceed expectations. Confidently-delivered blather is still blather. I don't know about you, the l...

by Tom Bozzo In BusinessWeek, Jane Sasseen's "Taxing the 'Not-So-Rich' Rich" tries to make me feel, uh, well, here's the lede: By any measure, Dr. Howard Hammer and his wife, Hope, have a comfortable life. Hammer, 40, has built a thriving practice as an ear, nose, and throat specialist, while Hope, ...

Micheline Maynard's story today on airline route cutbacks leads with small cities losing air service entirely, but arguably the more important information is in the accompanying table. The combined flight cutbacks at the 10 largest airports losing service (~1,500 monthly flights) add up to just abou...