The Scratching Post (Free subscription) | 08/28/2008
Robert Samuelson mentioned this film today . Here's the trailer. Here's a bit from Samuelson's editorial. Last week, I viewed "I.O.U.S.A.," an 87-minute documentary exploring the grim budget outlook. It is unbalanced budgets that, in many ways, define the political deadlock. The persistence of deficits over so many years (42 of the past 47) can have only one basic cause: Politicians...
Greg Mankiw's Blog (Free subscription) | 08/12/2008
Robert Samuelson reports that Americans are increasingly living near people who think like them: [The researchers] classified counties as politically lopsided if one candidate won by 20 percentage points or more. Their findings are stunning. In the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon election, a virtual dead heat, 33 percent of counties qualified. By 2000, also a dead heat, that was 45 percent. In 2004,...
GregsOpinion.com (Free subscription) | 08/06/2008
Robert Samuelson on Bishop's "Big Sort" ... Although Bishop is on to something, I think his argument is slightly overdrawn. Today's residential segregation of like-minded people has ample precedent. For much of the 20th century, urban neighborhoods subdivided by ethnic...
Going to the Mat (Free subscription) | 08/06/2008
Robert Samuelson talks about how much we Americans have sorted ourselves out into relatively homogeneous enclaves. It is not just about race and income as it used to be, but now it is about politics, interests and other matters. Go read it, maybe it is a cause of our political gridlock.
Greg Mankiw's Blog (Free subscription) | 07/27/2008
Robert Samuelson writes : The paradoxical thing about today's economy is its strength. No kidding. Consider all the hand grenades lobbed at it. Higher oil prices. The housing implosion. Large layoffs in affected industries: autos, airlines, construction, mortgage banking. The "credit squeeze" triggered by losses on "subprime" mortgages. Despite all that, the economy hasn't collapsed....
Angry Bear (Free subscription) | 07/23/2008
The reason some of us note that Robert Samuelson is not a relative of Paul Samuelson has to do with his tendency to write this kind of nonsense : The specter of depression stalks America. I have heard lots of talk about whether we are in a recession but none of what I have seen says we are reliving the 1930’s. This opening is akin to seeing a friend involved in a bad car accident...
PrairiePundit (Free subscription) | 07/23/2008
Robert Samuelson: The specter of depression stalks America. You hear the word repeatedly. Are we in a depression? If not, are we headed for one? The answer to the first question is no; the answer to the second is "almost certainly not." The use of "depression" to describe the economy is a case of rhetorical overkill that speaks volumes about today's widespread pessimism and anxiety. A...
Cafe Hayek (Free subscription) | yesterday
Here's a letter that I sent today to Newsweek: Robert Samuelson is correct: regardless of which party wins the White House or Congress, Uncle Sam is unlikely to get his fiscal affairs in order ("The Rise of Fantasy Politics," September...
The Austrian Economists (Free subscription) | yesterday
... to the editor writer in the US. In today's letter --- to Newsweek --- in response to a column by Robert Samuelson, Don sums up the nature of democratic government and the dilemma it represents for sound economic policy. 29 August 2008 Editor, Newsweek Dear Editor: Robert Samuelson is correct: regardless of which party wins the White House or Congress, Uncle Sam is unlikely...
SGHOUSING.COM 新加坡房地产网 (Free subscription) | 08/21/2008
The communist giant could destabilise the global economy with its economic nationalism By ROBERT SAMUELSON OBSESSED with rankings, Americans are bound to see the Beijing Olympics as a metaphor for a larger and more troubling question: Will China overtake the United States as the world’s biggest economy? Well, stop worrying. It almost certainly will. China’s economy is [...] Copyright...
China Digital Times (Free subscription) | 08/21/2008
In the Washington Post, Robert Samuelson writes: China's economy is now only a fourth the size of the $14 trillion U.S. economy, but given plausible growth rates in both countries, China's output will exceed America's in the 2020s, Goldman Sachs forecasts. But this is the wrong worry. By itself, a richer ...
Free Exchange (Free subscription) | 08/20/2008
I HAVE been trying all morning to understand Robert Samuelson's column today, in which he purports to illustrate the real economic threat posed by China. It isn't, as some might expect, that China will ultimately produce more than America. It isn't, as Mr Samuelson tangentially mentions, that Chinese growth places downward pressure on wages elsewhere. Rather, China is going to...
The Glittering Eye (Free subscription) | 08/13/2008
This morning Robert Samuelson grades Sens. Barack Obama’s and John McCain’s stated energy policies, giving them failing grades: Forget about a candid national conversation on energy. As John McCain and Barack Obama campaigned last week, that much seemed clear. To lower oil prices (which were already dropping), Obama proposed releasing 10 percent of the Strategic Petroleum [...]
taxmanblog (Free subscription) | 08/12/2008
Robert Samuelson reports on a study showing how neighborhoods are becoming polarized; not by race but by political party. The latest manifestation of this is what Bill Bishop calls "the Big Sort." By that, he means that Americans have increasingly "clustered in communities of sameness, among people with similar ways of life, beliefs, and, in the end, politics." Republican fundamentalists...
CARPE DIEM (Free subscription) | 08/05/2008
Robert Samuelson in Newsweek: The real lessons of the housing crisis have gotten lost. It's portrayed as the financial system run amok; the housing market became a casino. The remedy is to enact rules that prevent a repetition. All this is partly true. But it ignores a larger and more important truth: our infatuation with homeownership, embedded in dozens of government policies, has turned...
