The Angry Bear

College educational attainment by age demographic There is no economic data today due to the Columbus Day observance. So let me drop this graph of a metric I have been trying to find, of college educational attainment by age demographic, that I finally came across a couple of days ago: It is commonplace that among Whites at least, support for Democrats is highly correlated by a college education. What is unclear is whether that is actually a function...

Kip Sullivan and I have had a running dialogue over the last year or so. Kip has been writing for such sites as The Health Care Blog, other blogs and newspaper. I find his knowledge insightful as we discuss what we know and where we are going with healthcare. Today Kip is working on implementing “Health Care For All – Minnesota” and is also developing a 3-year research and public education campaign. If you have questions this is the person to ask them....

by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for October 5 – 9 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. Because the pandemic so quickly and completely put the economy in a coma back in April, and the economy remains at severely depressed levels by most metrics compared with a year ago, in June I started to compared current levels with the worst pandemic readings.  This week I went further, and calculated the best readings since the...

Coronavirus dashboard for October 9: everybody has to touch the hot stove at least once Total confirmed US infections: 7,605,218* Average infections last 7 days: 46,869 Total US deaths: 212,762 *Actual number is probably 5 to 7 million higher, or about 4% of the total US population Source: COVID Tracking Project In the last 4 weeks, the average number of new infections has risen again. Here is the breakdown by regions: Here is the same for deaths:...

Steve Hutkins at Save the Post Office Another federal court has ruled against the Postal Service. The United States Postal Service is now 0 for 6. In the case of Richardson v Trump, Judge Emmet Sullivan has ordered a preliminary injunction putting limits on postal operations in the run-up to the election. (Sullivan had also issued a preliminary injunction in Vote Forward v DeJoy.)  In his Opinion Sullivan writes, “The Court shall grant Plaintiffs’...

When did Israel Become “America’s Best Ally”?  In the recent US Vice Presidential debate, the current US VP, Mike Pence dropped a throwaway line that until nobody has noticed until now. He labeled Israel as America’s “best ally,” or a term meaning the same thing. I think that from at least 1917 the “best ally” of the US was either Canada or the UK. Under Trump, both of those alliances were downgraded, although they were loyal to us for all that time. So...

August JOLTS report conforms to prior early recession recovery pattern Yesterday’s JOLTS report for August showed a jobs market that is still just beginning to mend. Hires were up, and layoffs and discharges were down, which is good, but job openings and voluntary quits both declined. We are far enough along past the worst of the pandemic jobs losses that it is worthwhile to compare the state of the various JOLTS components with the 2 previous...

“The New England Journal of Medicine Breaks two centuries of precedent to take an electoral stand,” Medpage Today, Shannon Firth, October 9, 2020 Angry Bear Readers: I am stealing the NEJM’s title as it states all of the issues we are faced with today with the Covid Pandemic. “Dying in a Leaderless Vacuum.” The NEJM is not known for being political. Yet today, the NEJM is taking a stand on what is happening in the United States for the first time in 200...

Jobless claims: yet another week of glacial progress Today marked yet another week of glacial progress in initial jobless claims, at levels worse than the worst weekly levels of the Great Recession. On a non-seasonally adjusted basis, new jobless claims rose by 5,312 to 804,307. After seasonal adjustment (which is far less important than usual at this time), claims fell by 9,000 to 840,000, another new pandemic low. The 4-week moving average also...

Voting in a Time of Covid: A Question about Judicial “Originalism” The originalist theory of legal interpretation holds that judges, in reviewing the implementation of a statute, should be guided by the “plain meaning” of its language at the time it was adopted.  This is in opposition to the notion of a “living law”, whose interpretation should evolve as the conditions it addresses evolves.  For instance, originalists are appalled by Supreme Court...