Bob Murphy

Author Archive

Warren Buffett Bask

In his famous op ed in August, Warren Buffett wanted the government to stop coddling him and raise his taxes. He wrote that his federal tax bill was just under $7 million, and that what he “paid was only 17.4 percent of my taxable income.” OK so presumably that’s because most of his income consists […]

Wolf vs. Krugman: Separating the Economist From the (Bad) Accountant

Not surprisingly, both my allies and critics seem to be missing the point of my previous post on Krugman and (alleged) accounting identities. So some clarification is in order. First, here’s a simple one I made in the comments on the definition of income: If I do a consulting project for a guy and he […]

Proof That Krugman Doesn’t Read Mises.org

Well I really thought a few weeks ago I demonstrated that you need more than simple accounting to come up with Krugman’s constant assertions that debt reduction will lead to lower incomes. But Krugman writes today, in a post entitled “Death By Accounting Identity“: Martin Wolf has a somewhat despairing-sounding column this morning, in effect […]

Inside Baseball on GDP and Inventories

A while ago I dug into the mysterious world of GDP accounting and wrote an article (one of my personal favorites) showing the absurdities into which “inventory adjustments” could lead. On a related note, I sent the following email to some guys I work with about the recent revision to the 3rd quarter GDP figures: […]

A Dark Age of Welfare Economics

Paul Krugman, Nov. 22, 2011: In the first part of the paper, [Diamond and Saez] analyze the optimal tax rate on top earners. And they argue that this should be the rate that maximizes the revenue collected from these top earners — full stop. Why? Because if you’re trying to maximize any sort of aggregate […]

Ron Paul Disarms Occupiers

This is simply amazing. It’s funny how the various objections to Ron Paul as a “serious” candidate keep falling away. “OK sure, he can raise a bunch of money, OK sure he can win a straw poll, OK sure he can debate well, OK sure he predicted a lot of this stuff much better than […]

Kling for Kids

I am really hustling in my entrepreneurial capacities lately, so I haven’t had the luxury of commenting on the back-and-forth Arnold Kling is having with his critics on his view of economic “recalculation.” Specifically, the argument is whether we add anything to our discussion of recessions and recoveries if we talk about the need to […]

Contradictions in the Bible?

Last week in the comments, Major Freedom shared a long list of alleged contradictions in the Bible. I thought some of them weren’t very convincing–like wondering why an omniscient God would ask Cain where his brother was–so I asked MF to pare down the list to the ones he thought were really smoking guns. Now […]