Various web links I found to be of interest recently:
Howard Gleckman
A new paper by my Tax Policy Center colleagues Bill Gale, Aaron
Krupkin, and Kim Rueben concludes the answer is "no" to both
questions. In the cautious language of academic research: "Our
results are inconsistent with the view that cuts in top state income
tax rates will automatically or necessarily generate growth."
But Bill, Aaron, and Kim also have a warning for those who assert
that cutting state taxes is good for growth or raising them is bad:
All taxes are not alike. It turns out that while individual income
taxes don't matter much at all, and corporate taxes may actually
boost growth a bit, higher property taxes do seem linked to slower
growth though even that relationship seems to change over time.
Noah Smith
But the way math is used in macroeconomics isn't the same as in
the hard sciences. This isn't something that most non-economists
realize, so I think I had better explain.
In physics, if you write down an equation, you expect the variables
to correspond to real things that you can measure and predict. For
example, if you write down an equation for the path of a cannonball,
you would expect that equation to let you know how to aim your
cannon in order to actually hit something. This close correspondence
between math and reality is what allowed us to land spacecraft on
the moon. It also allowed engineers to build your computer, your
car and most of the things you use.
...
But macroeconomics, which looks at the broad economy, is different.
Most of the equations in the models aren't supported by evidence.
A federal appeals court has ruled that one of the NSA programs he exposed was illegal.
Telling the public about the phone dragnet didn't expose a legitimate state secret. It exposed a violation of the constitutional order. For many years, the executive branch carried out a hugely consequential policy change that the legislature never approved. Tens of millions of innocent U.S. citizens were thus subject to invasions of privacy that no law authorized. And the NSA's unlawful behavior would've continued, unknown to the public and unreviewed by Article III courts, but for Snowden's leak, which caused the ACLU to challenge the illegal NSA program.
A hotel in Tokyo is offering rooms designed to allow female guests to "cry heartily" in private
The crying rooms are the latest in a series of unusual hotels and cafes available in Japan.
Vin Scelsa concluded nearly fifty years on New York's airwaves
"Idiot's Delight" was a wonderful anachronism: unscripted, idiosyncratic,
and unashamedly out of step with contemporary listening habits.
"The reason is we think we won't have fun because we're worried about
what other people will think," said Ratner. "We end up staying at
home instead of going out to do stuff because we're afraid others
will think they're a loser."
But other people, as it turns out, actually aren't thinking about
us quite as judgmentally or intensely as we tend to anticipate. Not
nearly, in fact. There's a long line of research that shows how
consistently and regularly we overestimate others' interest in our
affairs. The phenomenon is so well known that there is even a name
for it in psychology: the spotlight effect. A 2000 study conducted
by Thomas Gilovich found that people regularly adjust their actions
to account for the perspective of others, even though their actions
effectively go unnoticed. Many other researchers have since confirmed
the pattern of egocentric thinking that skews how we act.
U.S. Secular Growth: Donkey or Racehorse? -- Jeremy Grantham
Mainstream economics continues to represent our economic system as made up of capital, labor, and a perpetual motion machine. It apparently does not need resources, finite or otherwise. Mainstream economics is generous in its assumptions. Just as it assumes market efficiency and perpetually rational economic players, feeling no compulsion to reconcile the data of an inconvenient real world, so it also assumes away any long-term resource problems. "It's just a question of price." Yes, but one day just a price that a workable economy simply can't afford!