Don't Quit Your Day Job: The Intersection of Personal Finance, Economics, and Politics.
A few months back we wrote a post asking readers how much privacy they would sacrifice to save money, trying to get a feel for the value judgements of DQYDJ readers on the common tradeoff of privacy with security and convenience. To me, the number of people who weren’t very concerned with privacy was a [...]
Below is a calculator which will return the difference in price of a barrel of crude oil between any arbitrary dates since 1987. This isn’t technically an investment return – it doesn’t factor in contango or backwardization, so investor returns could vary wildly compared to price returns. However, it is useful to view the price [...]
Welcome to the third and final survey article on the history of CBO Projections. This is a special one – Deficits. Read Part 1 – Revenues Read Part 2 – Outlays Just as we defined the last time, the Congressional Budget Office is an agency in the legislative branch of the United States Government tasked [...]
Our friend JT at Money Mamba recently had an interesting article reviewing the implications of Google’s new driverless car. An interesting piece of technology, the driverless car has logged (as reported in August) 300,000 miles and counting. What do you get for $150,000 in equipment, hundreds of thousands of miles, probably a million lines of [...]
The Congressional Budget Office, known to most people as the CBO, is an agency in the legislative branch of the United States Government tasked with providing economic projections on legislative proposals. The CBO is ostensibly nonpartisan, and was first created near the end of the Nixon administration in the Budget Control Act of 1974. One [...]
“Tonight, let’s declare that in the wealthiest nation on Earth, no one who works full-time should have to live in poverty, and raise the federal minimum wage to $9.00 an hour.” – President Barack Obama, State of the Union Address, February 13, 2013 No matter how big the stage you’re standing on when you make [...]
A couple weeks back we put up a visualization of Federal Spending per State. It was good fun, but we did leave out one ‘little’ aspect of that whole spending thing – Defense Spending. Cameron sort of explained the rationale in the comments – Defense spending is a collective good that would tend to have [...]
Update: Preliminary March data added. Enjoy! The calculator below uses long run 10-year Treasury Data from Robert Shiller to compute Treasury returns, based on reinvesting the coupon payments. You can see the total returns for the 10 Year Treasury for any arbitrary period from 1871 until today. After the calculator you can find our methodology. [...]
As you know from reading this site, the Government is quite a force in the economy – namely, taking in an estimated $2,468,599,000,000 in revenue in 2012. On top of that, Uncle Sam spent an estimated $3,795,547,000,000! As you might expect, both sides of the ledger were imbalanced between states – some states pay more [...]
Although this blog regularly deals with personal finance, economics and politics, our interests span a wide array of other areas of life. One of my personal favorite blogs, The Volokh Conspiracy (a legal blog that has a mostly Libertarian bent, I’d say if I was permitted to classify them) recently featured a fascinating article by Nick Rosenkranz on a [...]
