The Angry Bear

An Updating of Medicaid disenrollments in the nation. Clicking on this tab – state data will take you to individual state numeric. Some states attack the issue of disenrollment with a relish even when the federal government is picking up most of the tab to enroll them. In the end, they will still show up at a hospital to be treated. Andrew Sprung and I exchanged a few comments the other day. My suggestion was to enroll people automatically into...

Having gone from trump to Biden. a person who I thought would never make a good president makes Steve’s argument on Bad Government being the problem when trump was the president. Asymptosis » Government is Not the Problem. Bad Government is the Problem, Steve Roth. And the solution to bad government is … good government. A lot of people — maybe even most Americans — think that making government smaller will make it better. But that...

New Year, same old labor market deceleration  – by New Deal democrat This morning’s JOLTS report for November continued the same trend of labor market deceleration that we have seen since the blazing hot boom of 2021. Job openings declined -62,000 to 8.790 million, the lowest level since March 2021. Actual hires fell sharply, by -363,000 to 5.465 million, the lowest since the pandemic lockdown month of April 2020. Quits declined by -157,000...

Introduction: Nice piece on how Americans are so tied to their gasoline powered cars, pickup trucks, etc. and the impact on cities and environment. What is key to this article and the author’s thought is this statement: “The obvious solution … lies only in a radical revision of our conception of what a city street is for.”  Where I live, the smaller city is 30 minutes away at 65 MPH (if they are doing such). If you drive faster, maybe you...

Strictly a copy and paste of the Senate Finance Committee Chair Senator Ron Wyden Committee Report. I can not add to this other than say, repeal the 2017 Tax Act. Interim Report: Big Pharma Tax Avoidance Senate Finance Committee Investigation Reveals Extent to Which Pharma Giant AbbVie Exploits Offshore Subsidiaries to Avoid Paying Taxes on U.S. Drug Sales. The Provisions in the 2017 trump Republican tax law allows AbbVie to generate most of...

Construction spending continued to increase in November  – by New Deal democrat I’m feeling a little under the weather today, so I am going to keep this brief. Total construction spending rose 0.4% in November, while residential construction rose 1.1%: Keep in mind that these are nominal numbers, affected by the cost of construction materials. Typically residential construction moves in tandem with building units under construction....

January 1, 2024, Letters from an American, Prof. Heather Cox-Richardson On January 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln signed his name to the Emancipation Proclamation. He said . . . “I never in my life felt more certain that I was doing right, than I do in signing this paper. If my name goes into history, it will be for this act, and my whole soul is in it.” The Emancipation Proclamation provided that as of January 1, “all persons held as...

Final COVID-19 update for 2023: mainly good news (at least on a comparative basis)  – by New Deal democrat Here is the status of the COVID-19 pandemic as of the end of 2023. It’s mainly “good news,” at least on the comparative scale. But as (now) per usual, we are in the midst of the Thanksgiving through New Year’s surge. Let me start with infections, which these days can only be inferred from wastewater sampling. Per Biobot, we currently...

As a veteran, I am interested in what the VA does in providing healthcare. Suzanne and Steve have a great interest is how veterans are treated by the VA. PTSD Is a Nightmare. A Fully Funded VA Can Provide Relief, jacobin.com, Suzanne Gordon and Steve Early Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is the often-hidden wound of war. Post-9/11 wars added hundreds of thousands of former service members to the patient rolls of the Department of...

The economic graph of the year for 2023  – by New Deal democrat I’ll put up the final Coronavirus update of the year later today, but before we leave 2023, let me put up the graph that I think explains about 90% of the economic data this past year. And here it is: This was a graph I created, and included in a piece called “Why the Index of Leading Indicators failed” over at Seeking Alpha. Here’s the explanation: the situation just...