Buzzcut

If only it were Tim Geithner or Barack Obama referring to some of our Bigger Problems, but here’s Dave Cieslewicz telling the Overture Center’s lenders to cuss off: The banks “should take a very short haircut on this,” he says, referring to the swap agreements. “They took tens of millions in interest and fees over [...]

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The Effects of Airline Deregulation: What’s The Counterfactual?

Matt Welch at the Reason blog takes credit for airline deregulation on behalf of libertarianism: The “worldview” of libertarianism suggested, back in the early 1970s, that if you got the government out of the business of setting all airline ticket prices and composing all in-flight menus, then just maybe Americans who were not rich could [...]

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Irrational Exuberance and the Overture Center Clustercuss

The Wisconsin State Journal ran a front-pager by Dean Mosiman yesterday on plans being hatched in Mayor Dave’s office for a city take-over of the Overture Center, our absolutely fabulous but debt-ridden arts facility in Downtown Madison.  The state of affairs is the result of an arrangement whereby about half of the donation was put [...]

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Green Shoots!

There isn’t much to complain about in this morning’s U.S. employment report. I’ve been keeping my eye on a few below-the-headlines figures, and those have been solid for a few months running. The household survey again showed increases in both the labor force participation and employment-to-population ratios; data on the reasons for unemployment attribute the [...]

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The Little Dutch Boy?

I am, as a rule, a fast-moving Lycra-clad bike commuter. I didn’t start out that way, but as Sammy Hagar might have sung under different circumstances, I can’t ride 12.5. At least, I discovered that it takes surprisingly great effort to limit my speeds to the point where hypothetical work clothes wouldn’t be drenched in [...]

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Yes, We Are Back For Now

I’ve been using Facebook as a light-blogging platform on and off for much of Marginal Utility’s inactive period, and it’s very convenient to click a “share” link and get an automatic (if not always reliable) excerpt and thumbnail image. Moving back here is not political, even though other lapsed blogging friends have been busy pointing [...]

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We Need the Jobs. As For the Oil, Define “Need.”

Dean Baker had a bit of a press-beating flub the other day with this annoying NYT analysis piece on the oil spill, in which Jad Mouawad’s slightly buried lede was, “The country needs the oil — and the jobs.” Baker does OK on the oil part of the claim, and resists the temptation to liken [...]

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Evolution Doesn’t Care If You Believe In It

1. Wired: DEET Mosquito Repellent Could Lose Its Bite More than half a century after DEET’s invention, scientists still don’t know how the popular mosquito repellent works. Now, using a combination of artificially accelerated evolution and painstaking anatomical observation, researchers have answered a fundamental question about DEET’s mechanisms – and in the process showed that [...]

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