Good morning. Hope you had a good weekend. Today, taking on Krugman, jobs just sitting there, the debate over income inequality and a little Saturday Night Live action:
Paul Krugman makes no cents (NY Post) I pointed out Krugman’s latest column last week. Here’s a rebuttal:
If you believe the Keynesian argument for stimulus, you should think Bernie Madoff is a hero. He took money from people who were saving it, and gave it to people who most assuredly were going to spend it. Each dollar so transferred, in Krugman’s world, generates an additional dollar-and-a-half of national income. The analogy is even closer. Madoff didn’t just take money from his savers, he essentially borrowed it from them, giving them phony accounts with promises of great profits to come. This looks a lot like government debt.
Wall Street’s near-death experience (Vanity Fair) Lengthy excerpt from Andrew Sorkin’s forthcoming book — “Too Big to Fail”
The Tipping Point of Western Decline? (Marketwatch)
The Democrats won’t fix income inequality (New York Times)
For one thing, the lazy liberal’s cure for income inequality — soaking the wealthy with higher tax rates and cutting taxes for everybody else — simply isn’t going to happen.
In part, this is because the Democrats have become as much the party of the rich as the Republicans, and parties rarely overtax their own contributors.
Stop worrying about income inequality (Forbes)
Despite high unemployment, good jobs go unfilled (Huffington Post)
Economists say the main problem is a mismatch between available work and people qualified to do it. Millions of jobs with attractive pay and benefits that once drew legions of workers to the auto industry, construction, Wall Street and other sectors are gone, probably for good. And those who lost those jobs generally lack the right experience for new positions popping up in health care, energy and engineering.
SNL says President Obama has done Jack and Squat (NPR news blog)
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