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""To dig holes in the ground," paid for out of savings, will increase, not only employment, but the real national dividend of useful goods and services," wrote John Maynard Keynes in The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. Of course, since Keynes was an More...
Picture piles of soggy copies of the The Wall Street Journal lying in the snow in New York and Boston. In those soggy piles is my op-ed titled "Confessions of a State Stimulus Czar". But, fortunately, there is also an online edition of the Journal; there, albeit behind More...
Lower tax rates spread across a larger base are generally a better way to collect taxes than targeting higher rates at a smaller base. This is one of the principles that has been guiding the work of the Vermont Blue Ribbon Tax Structure Commission ch More...
Change is a fractal; its results are chaotic. Small effects can have huge consequences; a black swan may or may not matter. The rate of change – especially the propagation rate – has accelerated in a time of easy and cheap global travel and communication. Ten year planning is an academic exercise More...
Even prior to Senator Sander's (I-VT) recent talkathon, one of the sharpest political operatives I know told me that Sanders might be preparing to run for President – probably as an independent. He has been commanding national media coverage, first with his reactions to disclosures, which he More...
The chances of my winning six or more out of eight games of Minesweeper are .00012% given my previous winning average of 6%. This average held steady for thousands of games and hundreds of wasted ho
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Unfortunately but predictably, bipartisanship has started with the White House and Republicans agreeing to SPEND money on each other's pet priorities. It would be preferable if they would agree to defund anything they don't agree on. We are going to have to forgo a lot of pet priorities to get de More...
Vermont Governor-elect Peter Shumlin and Deb Markowitz, his designee for Secretary of the Agency of Natural Resources "suggested that climate change should become listed as one of the criteria in the Act 250 process for new projects" according to vtdigger.org More...
Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who describes himself as a socialist, was the force behind legislative language which forced the Fed to divulge details of the many aid and subsidy More...
The US economy is working its way to employment health. Since last November private sector non-farm payrolls have climbed by over a million jobs. Part of the reason this growth hasn't brought the overall unemployment rate down as much as we'd all like to see is that government employment More...
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