The Grumpy Economist

Thank you and happy new year to all my readers and commenters.

Courtesy Greg Mankiw , the Joint Committee on Taxation distributional analysis of the new tax law. Bottom line: No change. Income cate...

Best sentence award: "It will not escape notice that New York buys subway construction the way all of America buys health care."...

I ran across a video by my former Chicago Booth colleague Austan Goolsbee that prompts some reflection on the role of economists as public i...

Greg Mankiw wrote a New York Times column December 24 criticizing the university endowment tax. I disagree, not so much with the wisdom of ...

Steve Williamson has an interesting new post on corporate taxes and investment, in which he claims that taxing corporate profits has no eff...

"Stepping on a Rake: the Fiscal Theory of Monetary Policy" is new paper, just published in the European Economic Review. This link...

Many commenters on the tax bill repeat the worry that companies will just use tax savings to pay dividends or buy back shares rather than ma...

Bigfoot's To-Do list Animatic from Lydia Fama on Vimeo . Vimeo channel , Youtube , website .

The High Cost of Good Intentions  is a superb new book by my Hoover colleague John Cogan. It is a political and budgetary history of U.S. ...

Hoover has just announced the 2018 Summer Boot Camp  August 19-25 2018 The Hoover Institution’s Summer Policy Boot Camp (HISPBC) is a...

How can you cut taxes but raise (distorting, marginal) rates at the same time? Add a deduction, but phase it out with income. Then people be...

The recent tax bill discussion revealed many ways that universities benefit from lots of obscure tax subsidies like everyone else in contemp...

The public and media discussion of "net neutrality" seems to have degenerated to "we want stuff for free." In the end, i...

Law and the Regulatory State is a little essay, my contribution to American Exceptionalism in a new Era,  a volume of such essays by Hoov...

John Campbell's text, " Financial Decisions and Market s" is out from Princeton University Press . With some mild chagrin...

The fundamental reason so many markets are not free, and so dysfunctional, is that the voters of our democracy don't really want freedom...

Source: Wall Street Journal So, what's up with Bitcoin? Is it a "bubble?'' A mania of irrational crowds? It strikes ...

Eight Heresies of Monetary Policy This is a talk I gave for Hoover, which blog readers might enjoy. Yes, it puts together many piece...

To illustrate MV = PY. (It was MV=PT then.)  In  Irving Fisher, " The Equation of Exchange  1896-1910," The American Economic R...