The Angry Bear

Fear and Loathing On the 17 July 2020, episode of Counterspin, Fair’s Janine Jackson interviewed True North Research’s Lisa Graves about attacks on the US Postal Service. ‘A Combination of Forces Puts Our Postal Service at Grave Risk‘ Jackson leads off talking about the recent appointment of Louis DeJoy, a big Trump donor, to be the new head of the US Postal Service. Upon being appointed, DeJoy promptly issued a series of memos calling for operational...

Catching up with wages, income, and layoffs Yesterday and today have seen several significant data releases. Let’s catch up. Wages The Employment Cost Index was released for Q2 this morning. This is a particularly important release because unlike the monthly “average hourly wages” number, this report normalizes by job category, e.g., it compares clerks’ wages in Q1 with clerks’ wages in Q2. So if clerks have experienced widespread wage cuts, it should...

Three long-shot Senate races worth polling: Idaho, Nebraska, and South Dakota On Sunday I wrote that it would be really helpful to have statewide polling in some Senate races that look on the surface like safe bets for the GOP, but might actually be worth contesting. The reason for this is that, not only are the 4 Senate seats most likely to flip from GOP to Democrat — Colorado, Arizona, Maine, and North Carolina — all showing consistent leads for the...

A Republican Idea for Onshoring Pharmaceutical Intangible Assets Alex Parker reports on a proposal from Representative Darin LaHood: As part of the next round of pandemic relief, House Republicans are pushing new incentives for companies to bring home offshore intellectual property — something that they contend could boost job growth but that critics see as another corporate giveaway … While the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act overhauled the federal tax code...

(Dan here…Joseph Joyce writes for Econbrowser) International Factor Payments and the Pandemic I have written a piece on international factor payments (migrants’ remittances, FDI income) and the pandemic for Econbrowser, the widely followed blog of Menzie Chinn of the University of Wisconsin and James Hamilton of the University of California-San Diego. You can find it here:...

In a post today at Econlib, David Henderson writes: Postscript: There was an unusually high percentage of good comments on my op/ed on the WSJ site. Here’s one I just noticed: In Michigan, our Governor ordered auto insurance companies to issue rebates – due to folks driving less I guess. But amazingly, our Governor who is owned by the teachers union, gave no such order  to rebate the portion of property taxes that go toward public schools. Even though...

Coronavirus dashboard for July 28: the “pain threshold” exists, and leads to a decline in new cases Total US coronavirus cases: 4,275,188 Average daily cases last 7 days: 65,896 Total US coronavirus deaths: 140,309 Average daily deaths last 7 days: 1,004 (Source: COVID Tracking Project) Several months ago I wrote: my forecast over the past month [has been] that the population of the US as a whole lacks the political and social will to beat the...

Goodbye To The Last True Georgist Economist: Mason Gaffney Mason (“Mase”) Gaffney died on July 26 in Redlands, CA of Covid-19 at age 96.  He was both a great guy as well as arguably what the title to this says: “the last true Georgist economist,” with such economists being followers of Henry George, whose 1878 book, Progress and Poverty, was the best-selling book on economics in the US during the 19th century.  George was a journalist who ran...

June durable goods orders continue rebound Last week I wrote a synopsis of the short leading indicators and what they suggested about the ultimate Presidential election result in November. Basically, they have improved over the last several months and suggested the polls would tighten compared with the present. Among the missing June indicators were durable goods. They were reported this morning, and continued their sharp rebound from May, making up in...