The Angry Bear

The American Rescue Plan included a fully refundable child tax credit.  The credit provides $3,600 per year for children under 6, and $3,000 per year for children between 6 and 17. The credit is paid out monthly, and slowly phases out for single parents who earn more than $112,500 and married couples earning more than $150,000. This legislation marks a sea change in government policy towards poor children.  For years, the poorest children have...

Prof. Joel Eissenberg, Saint Louis University discussing Senator Rand Paul’s outburst on the beginnings of the Covid-19 virus. “A little learning is a dangerous thing. Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring; There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, and drinking largely sobers us again.” ~Alexander Pope By now, we’ve all seen the spectacle of Rand Paul, a former ophthalmologist, bullying Tony Fauci, the internationally famous virologist...

EconoSpeak: K-12 Schools Opening In July, Econospeak, Barkley Rosser, July 31, 2021 I long knew it was coming, but it has arrived.  I learned of this because some have closed due to heat and or the pandemic surging, K-12 schools.  This happened in Arizona.  They opened in July.  Really.  People in those districts may think this is fine, but I am horrified.  I view this as a situation where a frog has been in a pot of increasingly hot water that...

Coberly: “We need more jobs with longer hours and cheaper plastic toys to distract ourselves from our empty lives.” being facetious . . . . Or Do we? EMichael: American Average Work Hours: At least 134 countries have laws setting the maximum length of the work week; the U.S. does not.In the U.S., 85.8 percent of males and 66.5 percent of females work more than 40 hours per week.According to the ILO, “Americans work 137 more hours per...

by David Zetland This book by Kim Stanley Robinson (KSR) came out in late 2020. It’s a CliFi story about The Ministry FOR the Future, a (fictional) UN agency based in Switzerland with a mission to protect future generations from our current (climate-changing) selves. The book is long (577 pages; my page numbers are from the digital version), with interwoven stories that sometimes peter out and sometimes take up more space than you’d expect....

Q2 2021 GDP: goodbye recession, hasta la vista recovery, hello expansion Nominal GDP before inflation increased 3.1%, while real GDP for the 2nd Quarter increased 1.6%. The real annual rate of growth was thus 6.5%. Real GDP is now 0.8% higher than its last quarter before the onset of the pandemic: The recession is over, as was declared by the NBER last week. In fact, so is the recovery, if one measures by GDP, since once all of the...

In their testimony before the Committee, all four of the witnesses described the rioters as being supporters of the Recently Disposed one (t·R·D·o). More than one of the four said that many in the crowd told them, the police, that they had come to DC at the invitation of t·R·D·o to stop the steal; and, — maybe overthrow the government while they were at it. With invitation in hand, come they did. By mid-day 6 January 2021, as many as 30,000...

Farmer – Economist Michael Smith talks crop prices, Will History Repeat Itself?, AG WEB Farm Journal, Jerry Gulke High crop prices, like much what is going on in the greater economy might be transitory. The author keeps up the tone that high prices in the silage department usually only last a few months. We are seeing this with lumber. We should see this in corn as well. I would venture to even go out on a limb and posit that climate change...

Taken from: July 30, 2021; “Letters From An American,“ Professor Heather Cox – Richardson The bigger story beyond the DOJ releasing six years of trump tax returns to the House . . . “Today’s bigger story is that the House Oversight Committee released notes taken by the acting deputy attorney general Richard Donoghue during a phone call between former president Donald Trump and acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen on December 27, 2020....