Submitted by CARPE DIEM
Especially in an election year, we hear a lot of talk about “raising taxes,” “lowering taxes,” “tax hikes for the rich,” “tax cuts for the middle class,” etc. etc. and as a result of an epiphany earlier today while driving to the university, I think I finally figured out why there is […]

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Submitted by CARPE DIEM

Seventeen-year-old Owen Beck played football and soccer for a local high school, but one day his thoughts abruptly turned away from sports and school. Doctors told Owen he had bone cancer, and would have to begin chemotherapy right away.
The young athlete suffered another blow—doctors would have to amputate his leg to […]

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Submitted by CARPE DIEM
That’s 1.238 trillion barrels of known oil reserves, or 1,238,00,000,000 barrels. And reserves have actually been growing, by 107.8 billion barrels since 2001, and 168.5 billion barrels, or 14%, over the last decade. Global reserves have risen by 36% since 1987 (map/chart above shows how the 1.23 trillion barrels of oil […]

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Submitted by CARPE DIEM
About the Senate’s successful vote to privatize its failing restaurants:

Wizbang Blog: If the U.S. government can’t even run a food service organization without driving it into the ground, how in the hell is it going to run our entire health care system?

About the Senate’s failed vote to tax the windfall […]

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Submitted by CARPE DIEM
All across the former Soviet Union, thousands of students are making the same choice—turning away from the Russian language to embrace English, as well as the education standards of Western Europe and America.

The implications extend far beyond the classroom. The language and culture in which people educate their young say a […]

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Submitted by CARPE DIEM
WSJ Blog — A pair of economists have challenged the notion that outsourcing threatens U.S. service-sector jobs, arguing that headline-grabbing estimates of tens of millions of at-risk jobs ignore the positive effects of new services exports.
In fact, the “hype” concerning labor markets and outsourcing is “much ado about nothing,” economists Runjuan Liu […]

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Submitted by CARPE DIEM
We’ve got the “Mall of America” outside Minneapolis. Well, the “Mall of India” is now under construction outside New Delhi, with 7,000 laborers working 24 hours a day. Watch a NY Times video here.

One big difference in construction methods: Indians can move bricks on their heads.
Visit 1800blogger to see all […]

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Submitted by Econbrowser
Over the past few days, I’ve been trying to identify appropriate measures of the output gap (and trying to relate that to exchange rate changes). As I’ve done so, I’ve come to realize that (1) it’s a difficult thing to do, and (2) interesting stories come out of different measures.
The easiest thing to […]

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Submitted by CARPE DIEM

When a high-ranking U.S. senator sounds more like Karl Marx than Adam Smith over the issue of energy prices, it must be an election year.
Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd, the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, appeared on CNBC’s June 10 “Squawk Box” pushing government control of corporate profits. Dodd said he considered […]

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