economics – Page 3 – Barter is Evil

Sorry for the lack of posting lately. I was prepping testimony to the state legislative committee looking at the revenue forecasting process in the state of North Dakota. That took a bunch of my time, as did the usual chair work and the like. I gave that testimony today so I will return to my rants and musings about all things economic, including sharing my thoughts about the forecasting of state variables (likely expand beyond my testimony) and my outlook for the state’s key economic variables.

23 June 2017

“Permanent” v. “Temporary” Tax Changes

Paul Ryan is pressing hard for tax changes to be permanent rather than temporary (see a representative article here). From a traditional economic perspective he is probably right to do so if he wants policy to have maximum impact on the economy, regardless of your preferred performance metric. There exists no shortage of empirical research on this topic and I include a link here to a research note that seems typical (and more importantly is not paywalled).

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05 April 2017

Newsflash:Economic Policy is Hard

I am paraphrasing our President in the title obviously. At the point of making too much of a political observation, the President’s comments about insurance could be expanded into many other areas so I cut to the chase and suggest the larger lesson learned should be economic policy in general is not easy.

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21 March 2017

Demographic Analytics in North Dakota

I will be attending the Second State Demographics Conference in Bismarck on Monday the 27th. Okay, that is not quite accurate. I am giving a keynote address as well as running a breakout session. The keynote looks at the how and why of demographic analysis in the state of North Dakota. In the breakout I am actually showing how I came up with the various different items in my presentation from sources to analysis. The spreadsheet (or spreadsheets, not sure if it will be one Excel workbook or many) will be available at the conference and later on here.

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03 August 2016

Top 100 Economics Blogs

Recognition is always nice and while I did not start my blog for fame and fortune it remains nice to be recognized. The website Intelligent Economist listed me as one of the top 100 economics blogs of 2016. This is really, really nice. It is not often your name gets in the same list as Nobel Laureates, soon-to-be Nobel Laureates, and many of the top people in your field. So thanks very much for this listing! There are many great blogs out there and the link below will take you to the Intelligent Economist post which has links to all the blogs they listed.

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