Archive for December, 2007
Home buying fee disclosure
Tuesday, December 25th, 2007Romney/Giuliani tied in latest NBC/WSJ poll
Wednesday, December 19th, 2007People are starting to see more clearly, apparently.
Mitt Romney for President
Wednesday, December 19th, 2007National debt clock:
Tuesday, December 18th, 2007NBA power rankings
Tuesday, December 18th, 2007Searching for deals at Amazon?
Saturday, December 15th, 2007Use the Secret Amazon Discount Tool from deallocker.com. Search by how good the deal is.
Will the Mitchell report bring change to baseball?
Thursday, December 13th, 2007From ESPN.com:
Roger Clemens turned out be Exhibit A in the long-awaited Mitchell report, an All-Star roster of players linked to steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs that put a question mark — if not an asterisk — next to some of baseball’s biggest moments.
Barry Bonds, already under indictment on charges of lying to a federal grand jury about steroids, Miguel Tejada and Andy Pettitte also showed up Thursday in the game’s most infamous lineup since the Black Sox scandal.
The report culminated a 20-month investigation by former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, hired by commissioner Bud Selig to examine the steroids era.
MLB Commissioner Bud Selig had this to say of the report, “If there were problems, I wanted them revealed. If there were individuals who engaged in wrongdoing, I wanted those facts to come to light. If there were recommendations that would improve our drug testing program, I wanted to hear them. His report is a call to action. And I will act.”
Will they–can they–clean up baseball?
Distorted democracy
Thursday, December 13th, 2007Via Greg Mankiw:
Two Brown University economists have, for the first time, quantified the substantial effects of winning early in the race for the presidential nomination. In a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, Brian Knight and graduate student Nathan Schiff demonstrate that voters in early primary states such as Iowa and New Hampshire have up to 20 times the influence of voters in later states in the selection of candidates.
Banking on social security
Thursday, December 13th, 2007From CNN.com:
Only 36 percent of workers in 2004 participated in 401(k)s and similar accounts when offered, [according to] the most recent data available
What do people expect when they end up 65 with only a meager social security check coming in every month? The government can’t do it for you, you’ve got to do at least some planning for your own retirement.
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What would cause a recession?
Wednesday, December 12th, 2007Not just the sub-prime mortgage market, although that’s a popular target:
…neither the direct effect of the subprime interest resets, nor the direct financial losses related to subprime lending, are sufficient, even in combination, to cause a recession. Even if two million households facing subprime resets reduced their consumption 25%, overall national consumption would decrease just 0.3%. A consumption drag must extend far more broadly than that — perhaps from falling home and high energy prices — to be a major macroeconomic event.
…At a debate among the economic advisers to the presidential candidates in Washington last month, the advisers to the Clinton, Obama and Edwards campaigns lauded soft- or hard-core protectionism, higher marginal tax rates, uncapping Social Security taxes, a bevy of new spending programs and refundable tax credits for every perceived problem, and argued that the Bush tax cuts were the cause of all economic ills.