The Angry Bear

To be clear, our national debt problem is due to revenues insufficient to cover expenditures. More than anything else, for the past 40 plus years, this accumulated deficit is due to Republican opposition to tax increases coupled with their eagerness to cut taxes on the wealthy given the opportunity to do so. Most, if indeed not all, currently serving Republican US Senators and Representatives, and State legislators have signed a pledge to never vote...

 Are Home Sales Bottoming? – by New Deal democrat For the past few months, I have speculated that home sales were bottoming. This morning’s report on March new home sales put an exclamation mark on that idea.New home sales increased 57,000 in March (from a February level downwardly revised by -17,000) to 683,000 annualized (blue in the graph below). The increasing trend in sales from the bottom of 543,000 last July at this point seems crystal...

Llyod Alter formerly of Treehugger was the one I would always read on Treehugger. I would say this goes back a couple of decades. I was writing my stuff in the comments section of Slate’s Moneybox or The Best of the Fray. Somehow Treehugger became associated with Slate and I picked up on them and Lloyd. In a most unceremonious way Lloyd was riffed out of Treehugger after many years. For all of his years at Treehugger Lloyd was let go in a rather...

by Joseph Joyce The Costs of the Defragmentation of the Global Economy The integration of markets across borders has slowed down, and in some cases, reversed. These changes come in the wake of the global financial crisis, Donald Trump’s embrace of trade restrictions, Great Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union, the disruptions in global supply chains during the pandemic, and the invasion of Ukraine. President Biden has shown a...

House prices on track to go negative YoY by summer, despite monthly increase in February  – by New Deal democrat House prices through February as measured by both the FHFA (gold in the graphs below) and Case Shiller (red) Indexes rose, the former by 0.5% (after a downwardly revised 0.1% in January), and the latter by 0.2% (after a -0.2% decline in January). Here’s what the monthly changes look like for each, as compared with Owners’ Equivalent...

Little Good can Come from Private Equity in the Healthcare Industry, Angry Bear Two Years ago As if we did not have enough issues with the commercial healthcare insurance industry attempting to supplant single payer Medicare (minus setting hospital budgets, doctor fees, and pharmaceutical costs to the consumer) and the VA with commercial healthcare insurance and/or Medicare Advantage and ACOs? Commercial Healthcare Insurance and Medicare...

Much of this article I rewrote to make it clearer for the reader. It is written by upper management. I do disagree with the conclusions. Throwing more money at healthcare is not going to solve the issues he discusses. The article praises Commercial Healthcare Insurance who pay more for patient care and whose costs are twice Medicare of which much is administrative cost. The issue is not Medicare or Medicare. The issue is the cost of the...

Income tax withholding payments stumble again  – by New Deal democrat The important data this week will include new home sales tomorrow, Q1 GDP and initial jobless claims on Thursday, and most importantly of all (imo) real personal income and spending, along with real manufacturing and trade sales on Friday. In the meantime, today let me take another look at a significant coincident indicator, income tax withholding payments, because the...

Open Thread April 20, 2023, Angry Bear angrybearblog.com Tags: open thread

The last dissent of Thurgood Marshall: the Rule of Law vs. the transitory Edicts of 5-4 Court majorities  – by New Deal democrat Daniel Kiel at the TPM Cafe, on the supreme differences between Clarence Thomas and his predecessor, Thurgood Marshall, writes: “Thurgood Marshall, … in his final opinion before retiring after a quarter century on the court, [ ]warned that his fellow justices’ growing appetite to revisit – and reverse – prior...