The estimable Chug asks me: Curious what you consider the top classic movies and books about American politics and DC. Today let’s do movies, the following come to mind: 1. All the President’s Men. 2. No Way Out: Gene Hackman at his peak. The Conversation also might count as a DC movie. 3. The Exorcist, … Read more
The Complacent Class (Episode 1/5) Compare today to the 1950s. At that time, a typical apartment in New York City rented for about $60 per month, or, adjusting for inflation, about $530 a month. … Or to put that 1950s rent in perspective, the U.S. median wage at that time was about $5,000 a year, … Read more
For the past four years, I’ve been ordering the most unappatizing sounding item on the menu when I eat at nice restaurants. This counterintuitive advice from Tyler Cowen’s 2007 book Discover Your Inner Economist has worked surprisingly well. Cowen’s newest book, An Economist Gets Lunch, is a combination of practical eating advice like this, and … Read more
In general I find Congressional reform proposals, including filibuster abolition, difficult to evaluate. There is no simple model at hand. Sometimes the median voter model is useful, but in most cases it implies the reforms don’t matter, a conclusion which I would not wish to accept so readily. Multi-dimensional cycling models often imply that either … Read more
Dissatisfaction with the federal tax system has led to a debate about U.S. tax reform, including proposals for a national consumption tax. One type of proposed consumption tax is a value-added tax (VAT), widely used around the world. A VAT is levied on the difference between a business’s sales and its purchases of goods and … Read more