Tim Fernholz

Ross Douthat writes about the fiscal commission’s working paper: The fact that so many Democrats look at Simpson-Bowles’s vision of a future where the government takes in substantially more revenue than it does today and see a dreadful sell-out to the right tells you something important, and depressing, about liberal intransigence where the future trajectory […]

…Glenn Beck is repeating it on television. I recently wrote about an idea being promoted on Business Insider, a financial news website, that October’s employment report was misleading due to bad data adjustment. Well, it turns out that Beck was ahead of me; yesterday on his show he noted, quite accurately, that “some people would […]

The jobs report released earlier this month reported a surprising amount of jobs growth, even though it continued to show that we aren’t producing enough to dig ourselves out of 9.6 percent unemployment. Last week, I noticed that Henry Blodget, the disgraced former investment analyst who has reinvented himself as a financial journalist, had a […]

Sam Stein has excerpts from Richard Wolffe’s new book on the White House. Here’s a somewhat contrarian take on the dynamics between Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, and President Obama as the White House moved toward supporting former Fed Chair Paul Volcker’s plan to ban proprietary trading at Wall Street banks. [Summers’] doubts sat there in […]

Kevin Drum certainly does an admirable fisking of claims that “uncertainty” is driving the economic doldrums, thoroughly refuting the confusion that businesses apparently have about the future of government policy. The broader question about “uncertainty,” though, is this: When has their ever been a consensus that government policy won’t change? That is, has there even […]

… I don’t actually think the administration has been as wishy-washy as people think, because the main evidence for their wishy-washiness is this Huffington Post story, which has a remarkably over-the-top headline with no clear evidence to support it. There are some quotes from White House adviser David Axelrod that support the administration’s position, followed […]

After I wrote this post about the deficit commission yesterday, I had a chance to speak with one of the commission’s staffers, which shifted my perspective somewhat. There is more to like in the proposal than I originally thought, but it still bakes conservative priorities into the budget, which is seriously problematic if this plan […]

Speaking of labor, one interesting development is the decision by the NFL players union to affiliate team members with AFL-CIO locals, fully integrating the organization into the country’s largest labor federation; Ben Smith obtained a memo from President Richard Trumka pledging to work with the players on “common challenges.” This is important in advance of […]

It’s amazing how the coverage of the Chairman’s mark — a rough draft or working paper, basically — from the Fiscal Commission treats it as though it were the official report, due December 1. It is not! It represents the thinking of two people on the commission, not all 18 members. Why would they release […]