The Angry Bear

In a recent post, the blogger/economist Donald Boudreaux expressed deep fear of the people protesting for police reform and of progressive politics generally.  Below is an open letter responding to his post.  It is long (mostly below the fold) but it highlights some of the key issues separating libertarians and classical liberals from progressives and liberal egalitarians.  I hope you’ll take the time to click through!  Comments welcome as always....

The 2020 Presidential election as forecast by State polling As we all know, in the US Presidential election national polls are of limited use, as the election is actually decided on a State by State basis. I’ve seen lots of projections of the Electoral College vote based on national polls, but what if we go just by State polls, and in particular State polls that have been reported in the last 30 days? That, dear reader, is what the following map looks...

Coronavirus dashboard for June 19: infections and hospitalizations have increased; it may be too late for Arizona Let’s start with the basics: total US coronavirus infections are 2,191,371. Total US deaths from coronavirus are 118,436. Those are official numbers; the real numbers are obviously higher. The number of daily new infections averaged over a week has started to rise decisively. After a low of 20,357 on June 9, as of the 18th it has risen to...

Springsteen: “I had another show prepared for broadcast this week on this strange and eventful summer, but with 100,000+ Americans dying over the last few months and the empty, shamed response from our leaders, I’ve been simply pissed off.  Those lives deserved better than just being inconvenient statistics for our President’s re-election efforts. It’s a national disgrace. If you haven’t noticed, President Trump—or anyone in the White House, really—hasn’t...

by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for June 15 – 19 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha.Almost all of the metrics have improved off of their worst readings. Enough of the short leading indicators have improved so much that the short term forecast was upgraded to neutral as of this week. As usual, clicking over and reading should bring you “up to the moment” on the economy, and it also rewards me with a penny or two for...

by David Zetland    (One handed economist) Interesting stuff “Biohacking life” — a physics geek gets into our metabolism Governments are printing money to “get out of the crisis”, but they are probably sowing the seeds of the next crisis (of inflation? fiscal collapse?) An incredibly interesting dive into Japanese cosmology The American Press Is Destroying Itself (under pressures of political correctness) This is the governance article (good/bad responses...

New and continued jobless claims level off, as spreading secondary impacts and job recalls balance Weekly initial and continuing jobless claims give us the most up-to-date snapshot of the continuing economic impacts of the coronavirus on employment. Three full months after the initial shock, the overall damage remains huge, with recalls to work roughly balanced with spreading new secondary impacts. First, here are initial jobless claims both seasonally...

Do BLM Protests Prove No More Pandemic? It has become a widespread meme that the many protests over the murder of George Floyd and other racially based police brutality will show that it is fine to end all shutdowns related to the pandemic and end all rules about social distancing and wearing face masks.  Here we are reaching two weeks since these protests with thousands of people involved, supposedly all violating those rules, and we are not seeing a...

Angry Bear Still On List Of Top Economics Blogs For 2020 Intelligent Economist has again put out its annual list of the top 100 economics blogs, with some new ones and some gone, although two of those were due to retirements, especially the  Economists View of Mark Thoma. Closely connected Econospeak , Bondadd blog ,  and Capital Ebbs and Flows also were named to the top 100 economic blogs, ...

Writing for the Majority (5-4):  Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said the explanation offered by the Trump administration for adding the question “appears to have been contrived.” Justice John Roberts did leave open the possibility of change if the Administration could provide an adequate answer. Executive branch officials must “offer genuine justifications for important decisions, reasons that can be scrutinized by courts and the interested public....