The Angry Bear

Spending and Producing When a framing becomes ubiquitous you forget it’s a framing.  This is what popped into my head when I read a headline this morning about the infrastructure bills pending in Congress: Democrats Hit the Road to Sell Big Spending Bills as Republicans Attack. Yes, they are proposals to spend money; that’s one way to look at it.  But they are also proposals to produce infrastructure and social services—the spending...

Quite a few commentaries about Covid and a lasting impact from Covid as it migrates to various organs in both the old, young, and healthy. Of course, there are more articles than what I listed here. Waning Immunity Is Not a Crisis, Right Now – The Atlantic Waning is not disappearance, though. Even if vaccinated people sometimes do get infected and sick, it will happen less often, and less severely. That, in turn, makes it much harder for the...

Trade Deficit Fell 4.3% in July After 2nd Quarter Deficits Were Revised Lower, MarketWatch 666 blogger RJS Our trade deficit fell 4.3% in July as the value of our exports increased while the value of our imports decreased slightly….the Commerce Dept report on our international trade in goods and services for July indicated that our seasonally adjusted goods and services trade deficit decreased by $3.2 billion to a rounded $70.1 billion in July,...

 by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for August 30 – September 3 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. Even the indicators which should be most sensitive to rhe raging of the Delta variant show no significant deterioration. A few indicators actually improved. As usual, clicking over and reading should reward you with knowledge and reward me a little bit for my efforts....

Labeling for Increased Profits, Farmer and Economist, Michael Smith It is a well-known marketing ploy to label, relabel, and even mislabel a product again and again to increase sales. We think of the almighty Coke and the multiple iterations that they have had just on their cans. We’ve also seen consumer products like paper towels that have additives that make a mess disappear much faster, diapers that hold, ahem, waste better, and other...

Construction Spending Rose 0.8% in July after 2nd Quarter Spending was Revised Higher, RJS, MarketWatch 666 The Census Bureau report on construction spending for July (pdf) estimated that the month’s seasonally adjusted construction spending would work out to $1,568.8 billion annually if extrapolated over an entire year, which was 0.3 percent (±1.2 percent)* above the revised annualized estimate of $1,563.4 billion of construction spending in June...

Analytical Bias The world is made up of systems.  Our body is a system, or in fact a system of systems.  What we call “society” is another system of systems, as is the natural environment.  And all these meta-systems are themselves elements in even more encompassing systems that interconnect them.   But these systems are very complex, difficult to explain or predict.  One successful strategy, which has had a revolutionary impact on how we live,...

August jobs report: some weak points, but the underlying very good trend continues While the NBER has declared that the recession ended in April 2020, neither the King nor Queen of Coincident Indicators, industrial production, and jobs, have recovered to their pre-pandemic levels. The former is only off by -0.2%, but the latter – which is most important to ordinary Americans – as of this morning’s report is still -3.5% below its level in...

Why Hospitals and Health Insurers Didn’t Want You to See Their Prices – The New York Times (nytimes.com) Sarah Kliff and Josh Katz Some Background Tipping the balance to single payer? I believe Kliff and Tucker article in the NYT Times on hospitals and insurance helps to tip the balance. It is revealing to see what different hospitals will charge for the same procedure and what various insurance companies will payout to cover the same...

by Dale Coberly Condorcet and Malthusian essay relevant to Social Security and the problem of too much kindness [note, important sentences in the following are quoted from another author because it’s easier for me to write that way.  Credit will be given at the end of the article.] Goetzman: “In 1794 as the Reign of Terror raged the Marquis de Condorcet penned one of the most optimistic tracts of the eighteenth century.  He wrote...