""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...
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...
Congress doesn't have to pay any attention at all to the report of the Deficit Commission, even when it's presented in its final form on December 1 and even assuming it gets the requisite approval of 14 of the 18 commission members. The original plan was to require an up or down vote by C More...
If the "Draft Proposal from the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform" were adopted straight from the PowerPoint slides, there More...
I was Vermont's "Stimulus czar", a fascinating position to have after retiring from a career as a high-tech entrepreneur. As Chief Recovery Officer, I had an excellent inside view of the working and non-workings of the Stimulus Bill (formally "American Reinvestment and Recover More...
TARP was initially proposed and passed during the Bush administration; ironically, TARP is the cause of much of the anger that led to yesterday's stunning defeat for Democrats and "second chance" for Republicans. Sure, if he economy had come roaring back, things would've been di More...
A man sat next to the window of a bus tearing paper into scraps and throwing them out the window. "Why are you doing that?" asked the woman next to him.
"It keeps the elephants away," he said.
"But I don't see any elephants," she objected.
More...
Debtors, we all know, benefit from inflation since they are able to pay their loans back with dollars that are worth less than the dollars they originally borrowed. And debtors are hurt by deflation because the dollars they have to pay back are worth more – and harder to get – than the dollars th More...
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