Politicsmatter. Informed Comment. The decision of Standard & Poor to downgrade the credit rating of the United States of America from AAA to AA+ was clearly based on uncertainty in two major areas.
The first and least important was the wrangling on the debt ceiling, which took the US to the brink of not being able to meet its debt servicing obligations for as long as the impasse lasted. The second was the increasing refusal of the American business classes to pay their fair share of taxes. If a couple borrowed a big sum from the bank and had debt servicing obligations of say $10,000 a month, and they were repeatedly late and had a series of big shouting matches in the bank lobby about whether they might not just skip this month’s payment, then the next time they went to that bank for a loan, it would be declined or higher interest would be demanded, since they were clearly acting as though they were a bad bet for the loan officers.
It would not take a large tax hike on the wealthy to fix the problem. Theory Talks. Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference. Social Science Statistics Blog. 28 April 2013 App Stats: Roberts, Stewart, and Tingley on "Topic models for open ended survey responses with applications to experiments" We hope you can join us this Wednesday, May 1, 2013 for the Applied Statistics Workshop.
Politics by the Numbers. The Quantitative Peace. The Monkey Cage. Stochastic Democracy. Signifying Nothing. Comparative Constitutions. Election Updates. Political Theory Daily Review. Public Reason · a blog for political philosophers.