EconTech

I’m just wondering who has less credibility at this point, the IMF and their bungling of the last major global financial crisis (’97) or the Bush administration and <insert list here>. FT reports a little bit of this skirmish over credibility:

IMF rejects criticism over global turmoil
By Chris Bryant in Washington and George Parker in London
[...]

Mendacious Wacko of the Right Named Undersecretary Designate
Matthew Yglesias writes:
Jim Glassman, America’s New Salesman: One point people have tried to make over the past few years is that the Bush administration needs to stop thinking of public diplomacy as simply a need to put a better sales pitch on the same American policies. Our pitch [...]

Economists often say that voting isn’t rational. The basic argument being that the marginal impact of the vote (almost always zero) is trivial compared to marginal cost of voting (anywhere from 15 minutes to several hours, times the wage rate.. definitely above zero, depending on if you live in a Republican district or Demo…no, not [...]

Jack Goldsmith’s “The Terror Presidency” is one of the most interesting and most insightful books yet to come out of the Bush White House. In October 2003, President Bush appointed Goldsmith, a self-described conservative who proudly proclaims that he is…
link to story

Four years ago the Bush administration, exploiting the political bounce it got from the illusion of success in Iraq, pushed a cut in capital-gains and dividend taxes through Congress. It was an extremely elitist tax cut even by Bush-era standards: the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center says that more than half of the tax breaks went [...]

In February 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell, addressing the United Nations Security Council, claimed to have proof that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. He did not, in fact, present any actual evidence, just pictures of buildings with big arrows pointing at them saying things like “Chemical Munitions Bunker.” But many people in [...]

Two years ago today, Americans watched in horror as a great city drowned, and wondered what had happened to their country. Where was FEMA? Where was the National Guard? Why wasn’t the government of the world’s richest, most powerful nation coming to the aid of its own citizens?
What we mostly saw on TV was the [...]