How much the U.S. should allocate to the Department of Defense remains a contentious topic in the debate over government spending. After a great deal of chaos, on March 23—about halfway through the fiscal year—Congress approved an appropriations bill worth $825 billion for defense in FY 2024 to avoid a partial government shutdown, less than […]
Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle recently wrote that the best argument made in favor of limiting the size of the stimulus during the Great Recession—part of a larger conversation about austerity—was one of ethos. “We weren’t spending the money in theory,” she wrote, “or in 1945, when an ethos of fiscal responsibility prevailed. We were […]
All politics are local politics, the saying goes. And Turkey’s local elections, held this weekend, were a very good sign for the opposition to President Recep Tayyib Erdogan. Despite a very slanted playing field, opposition parties managed to outcompete Erdogan’s conservative Justice and Development Party (AKP) nationwide for the first time in over two decades. […]
The economy is growing, unemployment is low, wages are up, and inflation is down. However, the American people remain grumpy about the state of the economy. This puzzle was just investigated by four economists. They found that people often know that something is wrong even if statistics don’t reflect the problem. In this case, people […]