May 26, 2013

Reinhart And Rogoff Write Huge, Brutal Letter To Paul Krugman Blasting Him For Being Uncivil

Carmen Reinhart And Ken Rogoff Write Huge, Brutal Letter To Paul Krugman Blasting Him For Being Uncivil

Econofeuds just got real.

Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff — the two economists whose paper on the negative effects of high debt loads was exposed as flawed by a grad student — have written a long letter to Paul Krugman, blasting him for being uncivil and unprofessional in how he treats them in his writing.

The letter is quite long, not just going through Krugman's tone, but also in going through his past work and their past work to defend the work they continue to do.

LETTER & MORE:
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/reinhart-and-rogoff-vs-krugman-2013-5#ixzz2UQF6ZvyC




KRUGMAN's RESPONSE:
Reinhart And Rogoff Are Not Happy

I’m sorry, but the failure to clear up this misconception has done a great deal of harm — and this harm is not significantly mitigated by various remarks in passing to the effect that austerity might be overdone.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/26/reinhart-and-rogoff-are-not-happy/


Brad DeLong makes Krugman's points with graphs HERE:
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2013/05/accurate-and-inaccurate-ways-of-portraying-the-debt-and-growth-association.html

May 26, 2013

America isn't Falling Apart. It's Being Reborn.

SAT MAY 25, 2013 AT 09:18 PM PDT
America isn't Falling Apart. It's Being Reborn.
byMuskegon CriticFollow

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Bridges have crumbled before. And they will crumble again.

America is at a crossroads. Not a death spiral.

We're not going to be the most powerful nation on earth forever.

Neither was England and look at them....now they have universal health care instead. Win some, lose some.

The world is changing in dramatic ways, all around us. We are in the midst....in the MIDST....of a global revolution on many levels. Not just social, but technological.

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the REST:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/05/26/1211746/-America-isn-t-Falling-Apart-It-s-Being-Reborn

May 26, 2013

"Westboro decided to come protest in Moore Ok. This is part of what met them."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/25/oklahoma-bikers-guard-against-westboro_n_3333905.html

May 26, 2013

Dole: 'I doubt' I could make it in today's GOP

Source: Politico

Dole: 'I doubt' I could make it in today's GOP

Former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole says he doesn't believe he could make it in the modern Republican Party.

"I doubt it," he said in an interview aired on "Fox News Sunday" when asked if his generation of Republican leaders could make it in today's GOP. "Reagan couldn't have made it. Certainly, Nixon couldn't have made it, cause he had ideas. We might've made it, but I doubt it."

Dole, a wounded World War II veteran from Kansas and icon of the party, said he believes it needs to rethink the direction it's heading in.

"They ought to put a sign on the National Committee doors that says 'Closed for repairs,' until New Year's Day next year," he said. "And spend that time going over ideas and positive agendas."

Read more: http://www.politico.com/blogs/politico-live/2013/05/dole-i-doubt-i-could-make-it-in-todays-gop-164794.html?hp=f1

May 26, 2013

Robert Reich:Why should Apple have access to consumers if it refuses to pay its fair share of taxes?

Why should Apple have access to consumers if it refuses to pay its fair share of taxes?
By Robert Reich, The Observer
Sunday, May 26, 2013 0:24 EDT

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A Senate report criticises Apple for shifting billions of dollars in profits into Irish affiliates where its tax rate is less than 2%, yet a growing chorus of senators and representatives call for lower corporate taxes in order to make the US more competitive. The American public wants to close tax loopholes and shelters used by the wealthy to avoid paying taxes, yet the loopholes and shelters remain in place.

These apparent contradictions are rooted in the same reality: global capital, in the form of multinational corporations as well as very wealthy individuals, is gaining enormous bargaining power over nation states.

Global companies are not interested in raising living standards in a particular country or improving any nation’s competitiveness. Their singular goal is to maximise returns to their investors. “We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems,” said an Apple executive last year. “Our only obligation is making the best product possible” (he might have added “in order to make as much money as possible”). Likewise, the wealth of rich individuals flows all over the world in search of the highest returns and lowest taxes.

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Not only does money move immediately to wherever it can summon the highest return and be subject to the least tax, but jobs can be dispatched almost as quickly to wherever workers get the lowest wages for the most output.

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more:
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/05/26/why-should-apple-have-access-to-consumers-if-it-refuses-to-pay-its-fair-share-of-taxes/

May 26, 2013

Libertarians, a helpful chart

May 25, 2013

Krugman: Conservative Movement Allows 'No Room For Independent Thinking'

May 25, 2013, 10:53 am 79 Comments
The Closing of the Conservative Mind

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The point is that there remains essentially no room for independent thinking within the conservative movement.

Could you say the same thing about liberals? I don’t think so. A few decades ago, you might have been able to draw up a somewhat similar list for the other side, involving things like the superiority of tradeable emission permits to command-and-control pollution regulation, the general undesirability of rent control, the benefits of airline deregulation, the absence of a usable long-run tradeoff between unemployment and inflation (and hence the impossibility of setting a 4 percent target for unemployment). But many liberals eventually conceded the point in each of these cases (maybe even conceded too far in a couple), without being declared no longer liberal. The point is that being a good liberal doesn’t require that you believe, or pretend to believe, lots of things that almost certainly aren’t true; being a good conservative does.



http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/25/the-closing-of-the-conservative-mind/

May 25, 2013

"If the Left were truly tolerant-they would tolerate the Boy Scouts being who they have always been"

huh?

http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2013/05/24/2058051/right-wingers-freak-out-boy-scouts/

May 25, 2013

The Collapse Of Public Infrastructure Spending In One Chart

...............here's a chart of public construction spending (TLPBLCONS) as percentage of GDP.
You can see, public construction spending is lower than its been in over 20 years.



http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2013/05/24/18472121-an-overdue-conversation-about-infrastructure?lite
http://www.businessinsider.com/skagit-bridge-collapse-infrastructure-spending-2013-5

May 24, 2013

WOW-Massive man-made circular structure-between 2000 & 12,000 yrs old, at the bottom Sea of Galilee

Submerged Structure Beneath Sea of Galilee Stumps Archaeologists

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It’s thousands of years old — a conical, manmade behemoth weighing hundreds of tons, practically begging to be explored.

The problem is — it’s at the bottom of the biblical Sea of Galilee. For now, at least, Israeli researchers are left stranded on dry land, wondering what finds lurk below.

The monumental structure, made of boulders and stones with a diameter of 70 meters (230 feet), emerged from a routine sonar scan in 2003. Now archaeologists are trying to raise money to allow them access to the submerged stones.

“It’s very enigmatic, it’s very interesting, but the bottom line is we don’t know when it’s from, we don’t know what it’s connected to, we don’t know its function,” said Dani Nadel, an archaeologist at the University of Haifa who is one of several researchers studying the discovery. “We only know it is there, it is huge and it is unusual."

...........

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/submerged-structure-beneath-sea-of-galilee-stumps-archaeologists.php?ref=fpblg