The Angry Bear

Further considerations on the disappointing April jobs report. Consider the averages! I’ve been threatening for a couple of weeks to run some extended comments on the big miss in the April jobs report. As there’s no economic news of note today, here goes . . . . 1. It’s possible March was the outlier rather than April. The original report for March was that 916,000 jobs were added. In this month’s report it was revised down to 770,000....

for once . . . [embedded content] Good 10 minute dialogue by Al Franken

‘Cut the Bullsh*t‘ and Tax Rich People Like Us, Common Dreams, Kenny Stancil Monday is Tax Day in the United States this year and the Patriotic Millionaires—rich Americans who advocate for greater redistribution of wealth and power to working people in the U.S.—are using the occasion to launch “an offensive” against the “selfish billionaires, Wall Street tycoons, and CEOs” who are trying to undermine progressive tax reforms that would require the...

April housing permits and starts: a pullback from peak, but no recessionary signal UPDATED The monthly statistics on housing permits and starts, reported this morning, were mixed, as permits increased slightly and starts declined: The less volatile single-family permits also declined slightly. On the one hand, a high level of construction activity is continuing. But the three-month moving average of both single-family and total...

How should we grade our collective response to the covid pandemic?  What lessons should we draw for the future?  I believe that our response was poor.  To see why, just imagine where we would be today if effective vaccines had not been developed.  Our current strategy of moderate social distancing, intermittent partial lockdowns, and economic assistance for businesses and the unemployed would not have been sustainable for another 1 or 2 years as...

Steve Hutkins from Save the Post Office. As you can see, postal service delivery would lengthen from a maximum of 3 – day delivery to 4 and 5-day delivery service for First Class mail and Periodicals. The impact of the changes in delivery would would slow approximately 20.7 billion pieces of First Class Mail, or about 39 percent of FCM volume (see chart below). The Postal Service has requested an Advisory Opinion from the Postal Regulatory...

Coronavirus dashboard: entering the home stretch? G*d willing, I will only feel the need to update this information for another month or two. The US is simply making great progress on all fronts, and there are no new outbreaks in any of the States. Close to 40% of the entire US population is totally vaccinated, and almost 50% has received at least one dose: As a result, both cases and deaths are lower than their troughs last summer,...

Big Pharma says they need to charge astronomical prices to pay for research and development. Yet, the amount they spend on manipulating the market to enrich shareholders completely eclipses what's spent on R&D. Today, I confronted a CEO about the industry's lies, with visuals ⤵️ pic.twitter.com/c3jSLr0yVd— Rep. Katie Porter (@RepKatiePorter) May 18, 2021 Tags: big pharma, drug prices...

Unfortunately, carbon pricing does not seem to be on the agenda of either the Biden administration or progressive advocates of an aggressive policy response to climate change.  In part this neglect reflects ideological bias against market-based approaches to regulation and in favor of methods that are more direct in their effects.  But it also reflects hard-headed political considerations.  Carbon pricing is unpopular because it makes energy more...