Rush Limbaugh Gets In Trouble For Claiming That Women Who Testify In Congress For Contraception Are Sluts

Maureen Dowd does a great job of summing up Rush Limbaugh. In this case, she describes the comments that he made about a female law student who testified at a congressional hearing on the issue of insurance coverage for oral contraceptives. He called her a slut by describing the payments for contraceptives as payment for sex. He also claimed that the US taxpayers are the Johns because they are paying for her sex. In this case, Limbaugh may have gone to far. Several advertisers, who don't like being associated with publicity that may be bad for business, have cancelled their ads on his talk radio show.

Limbaugh's talk radio show is all about making outrageous comments that appeal to a large audience that shares many of his social and political fantasies. In this case, his comments appeal to anti-feminists, which includes many of the men and women who feed on his commentary. His comments also appeal to those who view government as their enemy, and to those who love to hate the Obama administration. Unfortunately, this is a big audience and our market system rewards him very well for stirring up hatred. His audience is making rational decisions about the information that it consumes and Limbaugh earns millions because of their rational decisions. The revenues from advertisers that flow to Limbaugh's employer contribute to GDP and the public welfare. Each of his listeners is maximizing his/her utility by listening to Limbaugh stir hatred. They don't even have to pay for it. They get a daily diet of this from Limbaugh that is paid for by advertisers.

Apple Computer Reports Its Indirect Employment Impact

Apple has become defensive after the publicity about the ratio between its domestic and foreign workers, which is about 1:10. It hired a firm to calculate the number of indirect jobs that have been created because of its products. There are numerous comments on the use of this method of measuring a firm's employment impact. For example, should a TV manufacturer take credit for the retail employees at Best Buy who sell their products? The best comment was by an MIT professor who said that it is not Apple's responsibility to create US jobs. That is a matter of government policy. Globalization has advanced very rapidly and most governments have not figured out how to deal with it. Corporations have been left to determine its direction by making decisions that they believe to be in their best interest. We used to believe that what is good for our corporations is good for America. This may not have been true in the past, but it less true today.

Is Income Inequality Bad For The Economy?

Joe Stiglitz provided his answer, and an answer to a couple of other questions, in this interview following his presentation at the Eastern Economic Association Meeting.

Does Macroeconomics Require A Micro Foundation?

This article may be interesting to those who wonder about the relationship between Macro and Micro. Rational expectations theory is based upon a micro foundation. They don't have much use for Macro models. If one has questions about the validity of Micro foundations, and many, including myself, do have reservations about the validity of much that is assumed in Micro, one can do useful things without using micro concepts. Most models used to forecast macro outcomes are subject to Krugman's criticism. It is more important to understand whether increasing government spending will cause inflation when short term interest rates are at the zero bound than it is to make a precise prediction of next quarter's GDP.

Comparison of Government Spending Under Reagan And Obama

Krugman provides some data on government spending during the Reagan's "Morning in America" and compares it with government spending in the Obama recovery. If government spending followed the track during the Reagan recovery, unemployment would be much lower today and our recovery would be better than "Morning in America". Instead we imposed austerity to make things worse. I doubt that these data will have much of an effect on those who accuse Obama of out of control spending. Nor will it affect those who believe that Reagan was a saint. When confronted with disconfirming data, true believers find a way to find faults with the data. The conservative think tanks spend much of their time doing exactly that kind of thing.

Krugman focused on spending in this article. He might also have provided data on the Reagan tax cuts which also stimulated the economy. Reagan's policies were Keynesian. He increased government spending and cut taxes which led to huge budget deficits in order to stimulate "Morning in America". Of course, during the Reagan administration deficits were not a sin in the GOP and Keynes was not the devil reincarnated.

Cuts In Wall Street Bonuses Creates Hardship

Many will not sympathize with those who are depicted in this article. It is a problem, however, for everyone when expenses are greater than income. The problem with Wall Street is that many get hooked on lifestyle that is considered to be normal. Taking one's children out of private schools, or not taking the right kind of vacation, would be a serious loss of status on Wall Street. It is no accident that people get hooked on an extravagant lifestyle and the need for very incomes on Wall Street. It happens by design.

High Rate Of Home Sale Cancellations Is Bad News For Housing Market

This graph shows that the number of home sales that end up as cancellations has risen dramatically. Some of the cancellations are the result of lower appraisals and the inability to get a mortgage. The largest reason for cancellations is simply other things besides the other two reasons. I suspect that it would also include other problems in the mortgage seeking process. Many applications for mortgages are never submitted if factors are discovered which would result in a rejection by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac which are the purchasers of the majority of mortgages. This is not good news for the housing market.