• Going Home for the Holidays: A (Temporary) End to the Payroll Tax Cut Fight

    Going Home for the Holidays: A (Temporary) End to the Payroll Tax Cut Fight

    Earlier this evening, Speaker John Boehner announced that House Republicans will support a two-month extension of the payroll tax cuts. With a call for a final vote Friday morning, Boehner and the GOP leadership have abandoned their current push for a one-year extension of the cuts in order to pass the stopgap provision and end the political battle in time [...]

    continue reading »

     
     
  • Live Blogging the Nov. 9 Republican Presidential Debate

    Tonight, CNBC is hosting, along with the Michigan Republican Primary, a Republican presidential debate focused on the economy. The debate is hosted by Maria Bartiromo and John Harwood at Oakland University in Rochester, MI. The participants include the now-established GOP candidates: Rick Santorum, Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, Herman Cain, Rick Perry, Ron Paul and Jon Huntsman. A series [...]

    continue reading »

     
     
  • Does the Jobs Bill Get the Job Done?

    Does the Jobs Bill Get the Job Done?

    The U.S. economy is very much like a car: for years the engine worked, but not so much anymore. It is not enough to just oil it up over and over. For a while that might get the car working, but eventually it will stall yet again. What it needs, in the end, is a full-service repair. Last month, President [...]

    continue reading »

     
     
  • Trust Busting

    Trust Busting

    Standard & Poor’s recently downgraded the U.S. to a double-A plus rating for the first time in almost seventy years. No longer can the U.S. be counted among the ranks of triple-A nations such as Germany, France, Canada, and the U.K.—not after the succession of economic crises that began before 2007 and which have only continued since then. But was [...]

    continue reading »

     
     
  • Pols Fight, Markets Fail

    Pols Fight, Markets Fail

    As far back as November President Obama was aware that Congress was going to have to raise the debt ceiling. It’s anyone’s guess why he thought it better to wait until the 112th Congress was seated in January, but he did. He was rewarded with weeks of grueling negotiations resulting in a deal passed by Congress on the final day [...]

    continue reading »

     
     
  • A quick and rather formless weekend post

    I’m sitting on a Megabus to D.C., and, as I’m rather bored and tired of rolling or widening my eyes in outrage and/or surprise, I thought I’d post a mish-mash of items with short comments. I know very little about India (outside of a few lectures I’ve heard on poverty and slums in South Asian mega-cities and the simple knowledge [...]

    continue reading »

     
     
  • Cloud Comparisons: Obama’s State of the Unions

    Cloud Comparisons: Obama’s State of the Unions

    Word clouds have become the norm now. After every big speech that President Barack Obama gives, every blogger and major news publication types in a transcript to a website like Wordle.net and publishes the results – word clouds showing the frequency of words in the speech. To save some time, I’ve referenced the word clouds of past Obama speeches produced [...]

    continue reading »