The Angry Bear

Alan Collinge at Student Loan Justice Org. is showcasing on Facebook various people who still have student loans even after the small loan relief. With these student loan holders, the ten or twenty thousand will go to fees, interest, and penalties as they exist or as rolled into loans. Very little (if it does) will touch the loan origination amount. The funds become gifts to the loan industry which originated the loan or the present holder of these...

In an earlier post, Steve Hutkins introduced Louis DeJoy’s new plan centralizing post offices in various locations calling them Sorting and Delivery Centers. Many mail delivery personnel routes would increase in size and routes would be further away and larger. The result could lead to delayed delivery and a further degeneration of service. The result would also include the closing of many neighborhood post offices which existed since Roosevelt if...

Lifted from notes by One handed economist David Zetland comes with this reminder about US life expectancy dropping. David goes further and gives the reasons for decreasing Life Expectancy. America, my increasingly ex-country, has lower life expectancy than 21 “peer” countries. This decline being due to a combination of death from Covid, cars, guns, and lifestyle. The first fact about Covid was sadly unsurprising: The coronavirus pandemic...

Weekly Indicators for September 12 – 16 at Seeking Alpha  – by New Deal democrat My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. Gas prices have continued to decline, with almost the entire Ukraine war spike gone. Meanwhile Tuesday’s core CPI reading sent the bond market into a tizzy, with interest rates going back up to their highs. The decline in gas prices is good news for the immediate short term. But the increase in interest rates...

Sen. Lindsey Graham, SC has been busy as a cat trying to cover up his saying, “And I’ll say this: If there is a prosecution of Donald Trump for mishandling classified information after the Clinton debacle … there will be riots in the street,” comment by saying several different things about what he was trying to say, when what he was really trying to do was bully the Justice Dept, the Democratic Party, the President, the Speaker of the House, the...

“September 17, 2022,” Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson, (substack.com) In 1761, 55-year-old Benjamin Franklin attended the coronation of King George III and later wrote that he expected the young monarch’s reign would “be happy and truly glorious.” Then, in 1776, he helped to draft and then signed the Declaration of Independence. An 81-year-old man in 1787, he urged his colleagues at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia to...

“Banking for the People: Lessons from California on the Failures of the Banking Status Quo,” Roosevelt Institute, Emily DeVito Introduction The current banking system in the United States and its fine and fee-heavy profit model is a barrier to economic entry and financial security for millions of individuals and families. Especially a barrier for those who are Black, brown, and/or low-income. In addition to being grossly unfair, our status quo...

Real aggregate payrolls and recessions  – by New Deal democrat One of my favorite indicators for the overall economic health of the American working and middle classes is real aggregate payrolls for non-supervisory workers. This is kind of self-explanatory. Rather than measure hourly wages, this is the *total* amount of wages paid to non-supervisory workers, adjusted for inflation. It tends not to be noisy, i.e., there is a lot of signal...

On April 1 2022 I wrote “I score Robert 4 Pentagon 0. I currently oppose the F-35 procurement program. No score yet.” I didn’t know that 4 days earlier on March 28 2022 Valerie Insinna had published “F-35 cuts, F-15 boost, and E-3 replacement: Air Force’s $170B budget makes big moves in FY23“ “the biggest and most controversial moves are found in the department’s $29.3 billion procurement account — including $1.7 billion to buy an...

First the US poverty gap is on the order of $180 billion per year. That is the sum over all households with income under the poverty line of the amount that household’s income is below the poverty line. That is a small amount of money compared to US GDP or even US Federal Government spending. This uses the official poverty line which is very low (and the official pretax cash income which leaves out the earned income tax credit and SNAP (the...