The Angry Bear

Letters from an American, Newsletter History Professor Heather Cox Richardson at Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences, Boston College chronicles today’s political landscape. Because it is difficult to understand today’s politics without an outline of America’s Constitution, and laws, and the economy, and social customs; the professor’s newsletter explores what it means, and what it has meant, to be an American. Professor Richardson follows...

Dale Coberly is a writer and frequent commenter at Angry Bear Blog who is well known for his understanding of Social Security and his proposed Northwest Plan. The Northwest plan was recognized by the Social Security administration as a solution to fixing the shortfall in funding now thought to be in 2034. An article about Social Security appeared in the Washington Post today. As written by another journalist on the Social Security beat who knows...

Extending START  It is not a big headline story among all the other things newly inaugurated Joe Biden is doing, but it is being reported that despite a generally more hostile approach to Russia, he has agreed with what Russian President Putin has said he wants, which is to simply extend the current nuclear weapons START agreement for five more years. It is possible that out of annoyance with Biden Putin might somehow at this point create a...

Initial jobless claims: still elevated compared with several months ago, another negative jobs report for January a possibility Initial jobless claims this week came within a hair of meeting my criteria for a change to an upward trend.  On a unadjusted basis, new jobless claims declined by 151,303 to 960,668. Seasonally adjusted claims also declined by 26,000 to 900,000 (last week’s numbers were also adjusted downward from 965,000 to 926,000)....

(Better late than never…Dan) This is a really slow news week – on the economy!  My retrospective on the Trump Presidency is nearly complete and will be published tomorrow morning.In the meantime, here is a brief note on the Small Business Optimism index which was updated for December last week, showing a steep decline across the board. Here it is: What happened? Was there some earthshaking economic news? A hidden cataclysm of supply or demand?...

I don’t know if I should try to make my contributions to AngryBear a noahpinion sub substack or if I should put this over at my personal blog, but I am always stimulated by Noah’s posts . His most recent “No one knows how much the government can borrow” is on a topic I’ve mentioned here (and here also Brad all following Blanchard): How much should we worry about the huge and rapidly growing US national debt ? Noah wrote that he doesn’t know and...

Will North Korea Explode After Biden Becomes President?  This is what was forecast in a column in the Washington Post by Victor Cha. He sees a combination of economic collapse, a massive spread of Covid-19, and a standard desire when a new US president to enter the office to be behind a possible outbreak of military assertiveness, possibly exacerbated by a much more serious collapse of the DPRK economy and society.  I suspect this is overdone, but...

David Hopkins has an interesting take on the failure of Trump’s presidency: Regardless of these challenges, the general verdict on Trump among historians and political scientists, reporters and commentators, and most of the Washington political community (including, at least privately, many Republicans) is guaranteed to range from disappointment and mockery to outright declarations that he was the worst president in American history. And there...

There is evidence from Israel that one dose of the Pfizer vaccine is less effective than was suggested by the few person-days of evidence in the phase III trials. In Israel  “over 12,400 have people tested positive for coronavirus after receiving vaccine shots” Israeli health officials estimate that one shot is about 50% effective after 14 days . The control group is not matched, it’s not a randomized trial, but it is evidence that the second dose...

This is an extended post on the caveat to debt and taxes 1. It is joint work with Brad DeLong and Barbara Annicchiarico. The point is that, in his Presidential Address, Olivier Blanchard notes that the argument that higher debt causes increased welfare is weaker than the argument that it is feasible. The Treasury can afford to increase debt D_t just by just giving bonds away and can pay interest and principal without ever raising taxes so long...