The Angry Bear

On Gerrymandering: “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government” Previously I have written that the Fourteenth Amendment specifically provides for a reduction in representation for any state that engages in voter suppression. Section Two of the Fourteenth Amendment provides in part: “[W]hen the right to vote at any election … is denied to any … citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged,...

I Think, Therefore I Know: San Francisco Edition Strange as it may seem, the biggest stumbling block on much of the left may be a crude philosophical error, dogmatic subjectivism.  This is a position that holds that subjective experience is the highest form of knowledge, whose claims can’t be challenged by “lesser” criteria like logical analysis or empirical observation.  To the extreme subjectivist, if I feel something to be true there is no legitimate...

Elliott Maraniss It’s with more than average interest that I just read a review of David Maraniss’ new book about his father Elliott, A Good American Family: The Red Scare and My Father.  I knew Elliott during my years in Madison as a contributing writer to his newspaper, the Capital Times, and as an informal sounding board for his thoughts on the New Left.  The period in question was the early 1970s. First, Elliott was the most visibly nervous person...

In which I nitpick Prof. Jared Bernstein about a consumer “economic tailwind Last Friday, following the release of May’s personal income and spending report, Prof. Jared Bernstein, whom I follow religiously, wrote among other things about some economic headwinds and tailwinds, including the following: Finally, my personal favorite tailwind indicator [pointing to the below graph]: the close tracking between aggregate real earnings and consumer spending....

Iran Nuclear Deal: Better Late Than Never? Monday has seen a curious coincidence that I have seen nobody else comment on regarding the  status of the JCPOA Iran nuclear deal.  On the one hand Iran has apparently now officially violated the agreement in terms of the amount of low level enriched uranium it has, going over the allowed limit, although it remains very far from obtaining in nuclear weapons. On the other the EU, more specifically and...

You can not use inflation data like the CPI to compare living cost is one location to another.  So the BEA has constructed a database  of Regional Price Parities  ( RPP) that allow you do do that for all states and the some 383 Standard Metropolitan Areas in the USA. .  I was preparing to show them when BEA published the 2018 data.  But that data willnot be released until next year so I’m going ahead and showing the 2008 to 2017 data. Note, that in the...

Housing: Elizabeth Warren v. John Cochrane Noah Smith has a lot of praise for the economic policy proposals from Elizabeth Warren. I’ll mention only one: With costs for shelter eating a bigger piece of Americans’ paychecks, and local government paralyzed by incumbent homeowners, the country needs a big solution. Warren’s would combine incentives for raising zoning density with increased public construction”. This is interesting in light of John...

As we start the second half of 2019 . . . (Updated: manufacturing almost exactly flat in June) First of all, I forgot to post a link to my post at Seeking Alpha on how a near-term recession is not likely to be centered on either the consumer and financial sectors of the economy, which are doing OK at the moment, but the producer sector – manufacturing – which is getting pretty shaky. We’ll find out more later this morning when ISM manufacturing for June...