Washington press corps catches up to 2002, discovers surveillance state

Exactly! Where was AP while the AUMF was being passed? On the side lines cheering?

Per the Wikipedia, Douglas H. Shulman was head of the IRS from Mar 24, 2008 to Nov 9, 2012. That means that he was a Bush appointee and was in charge through the 2012 election. So, any pre-election wrong-doing happened on his watch. But, who among us doubts that the Obama White House induced a [...]

It has been suggested that voluntary measures for birth control won’t stop population growth in the long run, i.e., that they would merely breed of a resistant strain of humans. ;-)

Summers has a well-deserved inferiority complex; two of his uncles are Nobel laureates in economics.

Per Larry Summers:

“… it is a grave mistake to suppose that debt can or should be accumulated with abandon, …”>

Per MMTer letsgetitdone:

According to MMT, deficits can be too high, since in any time period the Government can spend past the full economic capacity of the nation to absorb the deficit and cause demand-pull [...]

Thanks. Done!

In addition it increases the ratio, because the spending it cuts is usually high multiplier spending.

The simple argument at #6 works as long as the deficit is non-negative and the multipliers are positive, which they always are. And, if the deficit gets cut so much that it goes negative (i.e., becomes a surplus), we get [...]

My comment above boils down to this: Even if your austerity measures are so good that they wipe out your deficit, you’ll still have that same debt in the numerator of your debt-to-GDP ratio and a negatively impacted GDP in the denominator. That’s how to explain the failure of austerity in ten seconds or [...]

In fiat sovereign nations, such as the US, the UK, Australia, Japan, etc. we might also have the presence of an indirect relationship between variations in the debt-to-GDP ratio (debt/GDP) and economic growth through the actions of politicians who believe in austerity ideology pulling back on government deficit spending and consequently having a negative impact [...]

On a related topic, yesterday Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved tens of thousands of Jews during the Holocaust, was named as Australia’s first honorary citizen.

Hannah Arendt has a section in her book “Eichmann in Jerusalem” about the treatment of the Jews in most every European country. Her greatest praise was for the Danes, who she said scolded and shamed the Germans, telling them that their conduct was uncivilized. By the end of the war one of the top German [...]

Some of the comments and postings at here and at Dkos have derided Rogoff for being a member of the advisory board of the Peter G. Peterson Institute for International Economics : “That shows who he really works for.” So, I looked at the membership of that board:

Barry Eichengreen, Chairman Richard Baldwin, Vice Chairman Kristin Forbes, Vice [...]

I’d like to know why Clinton and Obama both hired Summers.

From what I’ve read, the answer is “the influence of Robert Rubin.”

And, from what I’ve been told, you could add Harvard (for the position of President) to that list, and the answer would still be the same.

Reading between the lines, I suspect that both Japan and Britain lack the notion of money coming from anywhere other than the banks, particularly the central bank. For example, when Adair Turner spoke of Overt Monetary Finance, it eventually became clear that he was speaking only of quantitative but without the intent of eventually selling [...]

And, God bless you for having dedicated yourself to this task. The only problem is that you seem to be able to write faster than I can read and assimilate.

And now, per this report, Japan is doing Quantitative Easing in hopes of causing inflation in the range of 2% to get out of their current period of deflation:

The country remains in a deflationary environment due to a variety of factors. Employment is down, the population is aging, the Yen (Japan’s currency) is weakening, [...]

Thanks. Rec’d.

What a tragic mess!