ideas

Five Possible Silver Linings in the Obamacare Decision:

"By placing the ACA under the umbrella of the tax power, Roberts may have made the ACA easier to overturn by several orders of magnitude. The ordinary process, of course, requires 60 votes to overcome a filibuster in the Senate. But when it concerns budgetary matters, including taxes (like the Bush tax cuts), 51 votes are sufficient to put the law on hold for 10 years. So, theoretically, 51 Republicans will be capable now of overturning the ACA at least for ten years (at which point it could be reviewed again). Fifty-one Republicans could have attempted this in any case, but now they can do so with much greater plausibility because this is a matter of taxing and spending and not regulation of commerce."

'via Blog this'

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Monday, June 18, 2012

http://m.seekingalpha.com/article/476231-a-crash-course-in-the-weird-world-of-a-liquidity-trap

Sent from my iPhone

this pretty much explains why Bernanke is doing what he has been doing for the past 5 years, in a way that no politician would ever dare attempt. Part of it is dangerously misleading, because although it is true that monetary expansion is not inflationary in a liquidity trap, it is incredibly inflationary if/when the economy rebounds. So monetary expansion isn't any more destructive than lighting a fuse. Overall, this is a really good explanation of where the U.S. economy is now, but you can't draw too many conclusions from this, because the situation in Europe makes things more complicated.