Archive for June, 2009
Recommendation
If you’re looking for good new economics blogs, let me recommend to you Modeled Behavior, written by friend and former classmate (and sometimes Bellows commenter) Karl Smith. He’s a Tarheel now, but we won’t hold that against him.
You Know, I Just Have a Hard Time Swallowing This
Jim Manzi writes: I’m also glad to see that Ezra Klein is explicit about his acceptance that climate change is expected to have extremely limited effects on the United States for at least the next hundred years. I figure that ought to be pretty important when debating the proper policies for the government of the [...]
You Wouldn’t Like Me When I’m Angry
Not quite sure what to make of this post from Megan: There is some very angry back and forth about the CBO’s scoring of the Waxman-Markey climate change bill. Economically, I agree, the per-household costs seem to be small. Politically, they may be much larger than their economic cost, for two reasons: first, I’m not [...]
CBO IS ALL-KNOWING
Jim Manzi, on the persistent overestimation of the costs of regulation: Presumably the same awareness of the track record of asserted prior under-estimation of environmental costs was available to both the EPA and CBO as they prepared their cost estimates. Unless we wish to assert that they are biased or simply irrational, why would we [...]
A Nice Try, Indeed
Jim Manzi attempts to push back against the CBO’s costing of Waxman-Markey: First, this isn’t news. As per my post of about a month ago (helpfully titled “Waxman-Markey Cost Benefit Analysisâ€), this is consistent with the earlier EPA cost prediction of about $160 per household per year by 2020. Technically, the new CBO prediction is [...]
The Cost of Waxman-Markey
So, everyone is turned on to the CBO costing of W-M, which is good. Two other points. First, as Brad Plumer notes, we have practically always overestimated the cost of environmental regulation in the past, primarily because we’ve underestimated the economy’s ability to adjust and innovate and so on. Second, and I should have emphasized [...]
Note for Calculated Risk
I appreciate the good work CR does putting together outstanding charts, but today’s comparison of house prices and the unemployment rate in Washington, DC is a swing and a miss. First point — that Case-Shiller data is for the metropolitan area, most of which is outside of the District (and he uses District unemployment data). [...]
Obama’s Mysterious Policy Reversals
Kevin Drum highlights three areas where the Obama adminstration has disappointed supporters by opting to largely continue the policies of his predecessor — on executive authority issues, support for the Defense of Marriage Act, and on a number of environmental regulations. Each can be sort of narrowly explained away, I suppose, on political cost-benefit grounds; [...]
Place Your Bets
The Congressional Budget Office has released some very interesting numbers (PDF) on the cost to households of Waxman-Markey. Very interesting, indeed: On that basis, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that the net annual economywide cost of the cap-and-trade program in 2020 would be $22 billion—or about $175 per household. That figure includes the cost [...]
Justice!
Via Yglesias, how can this possibly be true? In 1993, William Osburne was convicted of kidnapping, assaulting and raping a woman in Anchorage, Alaska. He spent the next 14 years of his life behind bars. Osburne insists that he is innocent, the State of Alaska has in its possession DNA evidence which will once and [...]