Blog: Beat the Press

Obviously Joe Lieberman was defeated because of the war. Three term incumbents don�t lose primaries because of their personal peccadilloes. But there is a side to Joe Lieberman that very few people are familiar with. Joe Lieberman played an important role in laying the basis for the accounting scandals of the stock bubble era.

Mary Williams Walsh has a nice piece on the unbooked libailities of public sector pension funds in today’s NYT. Supporters of defined benefit pensions and public sector provision of public services are not helping the cause when they ignore bad accounting.

New data from the Fed show that credit card debt rose at a 9.8 percent annual rate in June after increasing at an 11.0 percent rate in May. This extraordinary two-month rise is consistent with the story that homeowners are finding it increasingly difficult to borrow against their home � presumably because prices are no […]

In case you thought that the United States had a monopoly on bad economic reporting, the Financial Times is out to prove you wrong. In a column this morning, Lex sought to show that an increase in the value of the Renminbi will not necessarily lead to a decline in the U.S. trade deficit with […]

My earlier comments about the how projections of rising health care costs are driving the horror stories about the long-term deficits prompted a number of comments. I will make a few quick points by way of response. First, my claims about the poor quality and outrageous cost of the U.S. health care are based on […]

As has been widely reported, the July job numbers came in somewhat weaker than expected, with job growth of just 113,000. This is the fourth consecutive month in which job growth has hovered near 100,000. However, the actual picture may be somewhat worse than the official data show. The reason is that the Bureau of […]

When it comes to Social Security, the Washington Post editorial page and the truth never enter the same room. The editorial page is probably the country�s main promoter of the �entitlement� problem. This is the trick in which Social Security is lumped together as an entitlement, with Medicare and Medicaid, and then pronounced a huge […]

It is fashionable in many circles to warn of the impending bankruptcy of the federal government (see USAToday). Be warned � this is not a story about the evils of Bush�s tax cuts for the rich. These tax cuts are just a footnote. The real villain in the bankruptcy story is the projected explosion in […]

That’s what the headlines should have read after Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s speech in New York on Tuesday. While the fact apparently escaped the attention of the reporters covering the testimony, Mr. Paulson effectively endorsed continued large trade deficits when he announced his support for a strong dollar. In the non-voodoo economics world, a strong […]

This is the first posting as a TAP blog, so I thought I would mark the occasion with a comment on the housing bubble. We have enough data at this point (lower sales, rising inventories, falling median prices) that I feel confident in saying that the crash has begun. We don’t yet know the speed […]