Author: madpoliticaleconomist

I am trained as a political economist from an institutional economics department. I have worked for a large corporation, small businesses, in academia, and state government. I am an avid outdoor photographer, cook, mother and reader. I am an aspiring futurist and love the field of strategic planning. While my political views do tend to be progressive, I have voted for all parties and am a registered independent. I would really like to see intelligent debate and reasoned arguments return to politics.

Change

My favorite color is black. Besides its slimming effect it is the color of the void. In the void lies ALL possibilities and change. The void represents the future. We have the ability to construct a better future for the next generations from these possibilities. But it will require change. Change excites some and it […]

Innovation’s Edge or Fiddling While the U.S. Burns

I touched on this idea in the last post discussing the need to have a functional government. I am concerned that the United States is in danger of losing it’s competitive edge. A recent Washington Post article details how Chinese scientists are leading development in quantum technology (https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/08/18/quantum-revolution-is-coming-chinese-scientists-are-forefront/?tid). The United States economy has been fueled […]

Government Is Necessary

The narrative on government is in dire need of reform. Government is necessary for a modern functional society. It is not bad or evil. Not all government employees are lazy or overpaid or stupid. There are lazy employees everywhere because there are just lazy people. And there are ambitious, competent people in all sectors too. […]

The Laffer Curve isn’t a laughing matter

Many students struggle to understand how introductory economics course material is applied in the real world. Part of the problem is that some of it does and some of it really doesn’t. When I taught I would use the term Theoryland for the parts of economic theory that are more difficult to observe in the […]

STOP!

One of the first steps in changing our current dysfunctional political and economic system is to stop electing people who hate government to run government. The rhetoric and propaganda about how government is bad and unnecessary are constructed to reach a long-run end goal of having a government of the minority. The minority, however, realizes […]

Checks and Balances

One of my biggest concerns is what I see as a loss of checks and balances in the country. The media seems to be losing its ability to place a check and balance on government. It is now owned for the most part by large corporations and can be reluctant to investigate certain stories. Or as in the case […]

Resurrection

I am resurrecting this blog because I cannot stand to watch what is going on in my state and nationally. The lack of economic understanding is only getting worse. I love my chosen field of economics. But economics as a discipline is in a crisis of it’s own. It needs to lose the physics envy […]

Of, for and by the Corporation

Couple of interesting articles on the web today about the corporate takeover of our government. First, Chris Hedges post on Truthdig, The Corporate State Wins Again (http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_corporate_state_wins_again_20110425/) discusses how and when the corporate takeover of our political system began. It is definitely worth a read. The second article is from Fast Company and discusses how […]

Big Spenders

We keep hearing about big spending liberals but does that hold when we separate political fiction from fact. Senator Jim DeMint yesterday stated “The President made it absolutely clear today that Democrats will cling bitterly to deficit spending until our nation is bankrupt.” But most economists and even some conservatives are deriding the Paul Ryan’s […]

Let’s Level the Playing Field

The government subsidizes lots of commodities including fossil fuels, nuclear energy, ethanol, various crops, etc. Subsidies are the opposite of taxes. Taxes and subsidies are economic incentives that can and do change behavior. Taxes make the effective price of a good more expensive and therefore will reduce it’s consumption. This is the idea behind sin taxes on cigarettes […]