The Angry Bear

Not doomed yet v.2.0: beware recession porn Way back when I first started writing online almost 15 years ago, my very first post on Daily Kos was a little note called “Not Doomed Yet.”  It was pretty pathetic compared with the standards of my writing since the Great Recession, but the point of it was, back in 2005, that the conditions necessary for an economic downturn hadn’t quite happened yet. Needless to say, it went nowhere. To the contrary, my big...

Record Income Taxes? I should read more posts from Kevin Drum: The Yahoo News reporter comes close to explaining what happened by noting that there were more returns in 2018 than 2017. As you might guess, this happens every year as the US population increases. So let’s take a look at personal income tax receipts adjusted for inflation and population growth … In reality, income tax receipts were down 2.6 percent in 2018 compared to 2017. What this means,...

by New Deal democrat Why the revised Q2 GDP report next week may be the most important release in 10 years Last Thursday there were major backward revisions to unit labor costs. Since corporate profits deflated by unit labor costs are a long leading indicator, this had a big negative effect on the forecast for the next six months or so. Corporate profits for Q2 of this year will be released next week as part of the first revision of the GDP report, and...

Cheerleading for Austerity Not content to follow a news strategy that maximizes Trump’s prospects for re-election, the New York Times leads today with a story that combines economic illiteracy and reactionary scaremongering in a preview of what we’re likely to see in the 2020 presidential race. “Budget Deficit Is Set to Surge Past $1 Trillion” screams the headline, and the article throws around a mix of dollar estimates and vague statements about...

I’ll just post this link and let it speak for itself. Truckers voted for Trump in droves. Now they say his trade war is ‘killing’ their ability to make a living. Its starts wtih: Morris Coffman has been a truck driver for 35 years. And he’s been a conservative for even longer than that — his whole life. “That said,” Coffman told Business Insider, “[Trump] is absolutely a moron. His idiotic ideas will tank the economy even further.” Truckers, like...

“Tougher On Trade Than Trump”? This is how the NY Times has presented things day before yesterday, apparently lamenting that the Dem candidates are going to have a tough time presenting themselves as “tougher on trade than Trump.”  This somehow presumes that this is what they must do to win the election, and at least one has been making virtually this claim: good old Bernie.  A few have mumbled vaguely about Trump hurting farmers in the Midwest, but not...

It is standard analysis to see real and nominal imports as a share of GDP quoted to estimate the importance of imports in the economy. Currently that shows nominal imports are about  15% of GDP and real imports are some 18% of real GDP. But I suspect that this comparison understates the role of imports in the economy because services are some 45% of GDP but only about 16% of imports.  As my high school algebra teacher was fond of saying, you are adding...

Andy Borowitz, The Borowitz Report, COPENHAGEN: After rebuffing Donald J. Trump’s hypothetical proposal to purchase Greenland, the government of Denmark has announced that it would be interested in buying the United States instead. “As we have stated, Greenland is not for sale,” a spokesperson for the Danish government said on Friday. “We have noted, however, that during the Trump regime pretty much everything in the United States, including its...