Readings for Friday Fun Day

Let’s use Friday to get caught up on current events. Please read the following articles and bring your questions about them (and anything else you want to discuss that’s related to economics 🙂

• Leaders Will Delay Deal on Climate Change, NY Times, Nov 14 2009.
• Capital Waits as Budget Chief Crunches Numbers, NY Times, Nov 16 2009.
• Entitlement Spending and the Long-Term Budget Outlook, by CBO (Congressional Budget Office) director Douglas Elmendorf. You can see the latest CBO blog posts here.
• Fiscally Responsible Health Reform Redux by White House OMB (Office of Management and Budget) director Peter Orszag, whose previous job was… (it was discussed in the NYT article above). You can see the latest OMB blog posts here; of particular interest to you might be Birth date, business cycles, and lifetime income, about the impact of entering the labor market during a recession.

PS. For those of you puzzled by my supply-and-demand-curve references to “Yellow and Blue Makes Green”, here are a few ads (about a talking fridge, a comic book guy, and piranhas) that explain matters. Next time I teach this I’ll have to show them in class 🙂