The Angry Bear

Good commentary by Merrill Goozner. I subscribe to his site. He, I and other have gotten together and talked. I did ask the Lown Institute if I can publish their top ten examples of profiteering and dysfunction in health care. This group make my spidery senses tingle. Rather ask than get a reprimand. Got that one time and I knew who did it. It backfired on them and they were dropped by their host. Good writer and I was posting their commentaries...

It is bad enough with high healthcare costs for doctors, hospitals, medicines, care, insurance, etc. But when all of them start to allow you credit so they can collect their moneys leaving you to fend for yourself, it becomes outrageous. A common interest rate for payment plans is 16% to 19% with private equity. It is a rip off of those who are ill and the families who are willing to sacrifice all. It is unfortunate banks, etc., are willing to...

2023 was the year of the do-nothing House Republicans. What will happen in 2024?

Asymptosis » Economic Origin Stories and the State of the World, Steve Roth. Origin stories and creation myths pack a pretty hefty weight of import in human understandings of the world. Examples are too numerous to mention. What I’ve noticed in the field of economics is such origin stories are often taken (mistakenly) to fully explain the current state of affairs. I’m going to discuss two examples here. 1. Why Money Has Value. The “double...

We have been needing more people, people of some importance, to say something about the economy besides how bad it is. Mind you, no matter how good the recovery is; the negatives will still flow from the other side of the room. If you have been reading New Deal democrat’s commentary at Angry Bear each day, you already have a pretty good idea of where we will land. NDd: “Real retails sales stopped deteriorating YoY last spring, and have been more...

Sales lead employment: real aggregate payrolls update  – by New Deal democrat The drought in new data ends tomorrow with consumer inflation. In preparation, let’s take a look at real aggregate payrolls. These increased 0.2% in December, one of the lower readings in the past 2 years: On a YoY basis, aggregate nonsupervisory payrolls increased 5.8%, compared with consumer inflation in November, which increased 3.1%: Recall that...

Some light reading. I subscribe to it (The Atlantic) and have done so since the Civil War for a decade. Thought I would post one from The Atlantic’s News Letter (I think). Just an interesting read about something they discovered happening or maybe not-happening. People locked into something they do not like, have to stay, and when the opportunity arises, they leave. Especially if there is money to be made or less time at work or less work. What if...

USPS tells regulator, “Mind your own regulations.” Save the Post Office, Steve Hutkins The Postal Service has started off the New Year by refusing to answer important questions about its 10-year plan, Delivering for America. Earlier this week, the Postal Service told the Postal Regulatory Commission that its latest information request was outside the statutory authority of the Commission. The Postal Service has basically told the PRC to mind...

I was looking for a report through 2022 on housing. This was the best I could do. Maybe later? The report is about households with or without SS beneficiaries who are renting, homeowners with mortgages, and homeowners without mortgages. The study is looking at the cost impact in each category for those households with SS beneficiaries as compared to those households with no beneficiaries. Kind of dry; but, it gets the point across. Research...

I don’t know if kids these days still use the slang, but back in the glory days of blogging, a way to mock chicken hawks was to call them keyboard warriors or the 101st chairborn. These were people convinced they were fighting terror by advocating aggressive foreign policy in the safety of their own house (or by other insulting assumption their mother’s basement). I guess an even sillier bunch were the people who felt brave and manly while playing,...