Howard Dean rips into the Senate health care bill in today’s Washington Post. The bill was supposed to give Americans choices about what kind of system they wanted to enroll in. Instead, it fines Americans if they do not sign…
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is going to spend a fourth night in the hospital recovering from an attack by an assailant wielding a model of Milan Cathedral that left him with a broken nose and two chipped teeth. A…
Pope Benedict XVI has gone and done it: Industrialized nations must recognize their responsibility for the environmental crisis, shed their consumerism and embrace more sober lifestyles, Pope Benedict said on Tuesday. Benedict has always seemed sympathetic to environmentalists and has…
And here’s a topic related to my last post: some analysts at Moody’s (according to Economix) have come up for a new “misery index” as we head into the Teens. (We never quite decided what to call this current decade….
James Pethokoukis has interviewed GOP policy wonk-in-chief Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin on different policy strategies the Republicans should employ over the next five or 10 years. It’s not a bad list that Ryan comes up with. One prediction that…
Bryan Caplan and Bob Murphy, two economists, are putting their money where their mouths are and betting on their predictions for inflation. Caplan wagers that we won’t have double-digit inflation rates any time soon: At any point between now and…
Veronique de Rugy argues in Reason that soda taxes fail on economic grounds. Such taxes won’t improve soda drinkers’ health, because people will substitute other harmful drinks once soda becomes more expensive. And they won’t raise revenues, because if you…
Wlady — regarding Stiglitz advocating more stimulus spending: in fact left-wing economists have been after this from the very beginning. The stimulus that was passed was intended to mitigate the recession’s impact. But if you believe Keynes, the recession could…
The great economist Paul Samuelson passed away yesterday at the age of 94. Samuelson was perhaps the most influential economist of the 20th century, an absolutely towering figure. The New York Times‘s long obituary is here. The Wall Street Journal…
When the Democrats took control of the White House in 2008, they inherited, along with the burden of a deep worldwide recession, the enormous promise of the political capital guaran-teed to accrue to whoever presided over an economic recovery. Indeed,…