Archive for August 5, 2012

A scroll from the Dead Sea

There is so much inter­est­ing news this week, its hard to pick just one thing to write about. Hir­ing is up, the Dow Jones Indus­trial Aver­age is up…but, para­dox­i­cally, so is unem­ploy­ment. Since early 2010, the econ­omy has added over five mil­lion private-​​sector jobs, which have been par­tially off­set by a loss of over 660,000 pub­lic sec­tor jobs, for a net gain of about 4.5 mil­lion. The Fed­eral Reserve is keep­ing inter­est rates low, which is caus­ing some con­ser­v­a­tive econ­o­mists to con­tinue fear­ing infla­tion (for which there is, so far, no evi­dence).

Mitt Rom­ney returned from his whirl­wind tour, which received mixed reviews. He returned in time for ter­ri­ble reac­tions to his tax plan. The non­par­ti­san Tax Pol­icy Cen­ter called it “math­e­mat­i­cally impos­si­ble,” which is really not quite what we expected from a finan­cial genius like Rom­ney. Per­haps this is why he doesn’t want to release his tax returns: maybe he can’t add.

Speak­ing of con­fused sig­nals, The Dark Knight Rises con­tin­ues to do well at the­aters, despite the tragedy in Col­orado. Talk has died down about whether there was any inten­tional con­nec­tion between Bane and Bain.

But for me, per­haps the most impor­tant of cur­rent events is about to hap­pen late tonight. NASA’s lat­est Mars rover, named Curios­ity, is sched­uled to land on the Red Planet about 1:30 AM Mon­day morn­ing, East­ern time. (more…)