Each week, I've been inviting readers to submit quotations for which they want me to try to trace the origin, using The Yale Book of Quotations and my own research. Here is the latest round: ... Read the full post ... Read more

Do you have a flexible savings account? Are you planning on claiming medical expenses as an itemized deduction? What about your workplace insurance plan; is it relatively expensive coverage? Then you'll face some costs in the Senate's humongous health care reform bill. I'm no ... Read more

Nathan Myhrvold is the Intellectual Ventures chieftain we wrote about in SuperFreakonomics; I.V. has plans to thwart, inter alia, hurricanes, malaria, and global warming. (He has also written for this blog occasionally.) Now he has let The N.Y. Times into his kitchen. It is not like any other kitche ... Read more

The Iowa Fiscal Partnership has generated some headlines by passing around their take on a new study by The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy: Study says Iowa tax system unfair to poor Report: Iowa tax code favors wealthiest residents Report: Iowa tax system hurts low an ... Rea ... Read more

Four of the 26 students in my Economics of Life class proposed delaying submitting their draft term project reports by one week. I emailed the whole class and gave them one day to let me know if they disapproved of this postponement. The question was how heavily to weight the negatives -- those who ... Read more

Newsweek is running an online retrospective of the new millennium's first decade. My favorite section to date is the "Overblown Fears" list. Here they are, in order: 1. Y2K 2. Shoe Bombs 3. Vaccines Cause Autism 4. Immigrants 5. Bloggers 6. SARS, Mad Cow, Bird Flu 7. Web Predators 8. Teen Oral Sex ... Read more

If you missed Levitt and Dubner on their U.K. SuperFreakonomics tour, a podcast of their lecture at the London School of Economics is now online. So are their interviews with Reuters TV, Channel 4, and Telegraph TV, as is the BBC's piece on how SuperFreakonomics fits into the David Cameron book club ... Read more

I must be getting soft hearted but almost agreed with Suze Orman on a few things.  Guess she is ok if you just have to read her stuff.  Watching and listening is pure torture. She had an article on starting your own business and who hasn't sat there and dreamed of owning their own busine ... Read more

As part of his 2000+ page nightmare of a "health care" bill, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid would partially decouple the "Medicare" portion of the healthcare tax from the tax withholding system. For the first time the Medicare tax would be different for taxpayers with different filing statuses ... Read more

Nationwide survey found 12% of people responding plan to buy a home as an investment, twice the share (5.6%) expressing such interest in March. The survey by the online property listing service Move.com said the lure of lower prices and foreclosure bargains were chief reasons for the growing intere ... Read more