Politicians reap higher electoral benefits from doling out disaster relief money than they do from spending money beforehand on disaster prevention, writes The Freakenomics blog. According to a new paper by Andrew Healy, an economist at Loyola Marymount University, that creates an incentive for governments to underprepare for natural disasters.
"We interrupt regular programming to announce that the United States of America has defaulted," writes Satyajit Das. This is a pretty good (but lengthy) summary of the doom and gloom argument. Click here to read part 1 and click here to read part 2.
Martin Feldstein channels Milton Friedman in a column on the dollar. What cannot go on forever will not go on forever, and what we’ve borrowed, we’ll ultimately have to pay back, says Mr Feldstein. Ultimately, America will need to have a trade surplus, and the dollar will go as low as it needs to to bring about that state of affairs.
The news that 4 people had been arrested in Iowa while trying to perform a citizen’s arrest on Karl Rove got Nathan Robinson wondering: Can we arrest Bush administration officials ourselves?