themill

What was the best part of the Twin Cities Pride Parade for you?

The basic idea is something like this. Suppose person A gets a job from the government, paying $50K/year. Person A is going to spend most of that money buying goods and services from other people. Suppose he spends $45K. Each person who gets a piece of that $45K is going to spend that money on someone else, perhaps a total of $40.5K. So the initial $50K spent by the government is starting to turn into a whole heck of a lot of economic activity. This goes on and on and is often called the spending multiplier. The idea is that if you are taxing some of this economic activity at each step, the amount of tax you generate could be more than the amount you spent in the first place!

Not every economist thinks this is the case, and there's a lot of debate over the size of the spending multiplier.

Except there is no assault weapons ban in the bill, there are no magazine capacity limits in the bill, and there is no gun registry in the bill.

So what exactly is your problem?

Hi Keith, constituent from Minneapolis here. Couple of questions:

• Do you support Aaron's Law, introduced by Rep. Zoe Lofgren? What are the chances of it actually passing given the current environment in the House?

• Can you talk a little bit about how you produce a budget like this? Particularly a budget that, in this political environment, has little chance of passing? How do you form the economic assumptions that flow into your numbers? Which economists contributed to the analysis?

• Finally, the post-election political climate has been incredibly frustrating for people like me -- I contributed to your campaign, as well as President Obama's and Senator Klobuchar, knocked on doors throughout the metro area, climbed up and down public housing towers registering voters and helped deliver a strong electoral performance for our President. And yet on issue after issue, from the sequester to gun safety legislation, action is non-existent. How can we fix this system? Is there anything we can do other than try to keep our motivation up until 2014?

The other stuff I'm with you on, but he issued an executive order to try to close Gitmo but Congress essentially forced it to remain open.