The Angry Bear

by New Deal democrat Personal spending and new home sales: restrain your enthusiasm!  We got the last two significant data points of the year this morning: personal spending and new home sales.  Both rose significantly. BUT there are big drawbacks to each. First of all, take a look at the personal savings rate: It just made a new low, at 2.9%, for this expansion.  On the one hand, this is a concrete measure of consumer confidence, in that...

I hope this simple note finds you and family in good health and cheer.

Even though most states have done little to improve access to healthcare, it is ok for states to regulate ACA and Medicaid as states are supposedly closer to their constituent’s needs. If the Federal government steps in and tries to regulate voting registration requiring ID, planned parenthood, ACA, etc. because certain state(s) give a damn about discrimination, children, and human rights; then, it is a supposed violation of state rights. For once, states...

What is the GOP goal? A return to the “gilded age” (or worse) When right-wing Roy Moore said that the time when America was great was during slavery, he revealed something key to the current GOP members of Congress and state legislatures–their primary goal is to return to a time when owners of property held all the keys to the kingdom and workers were just serfs expected to do as told and whose lives didn’t really matter much to the boss capitalists....

The Poland Peoblem: How A Good Economy Does Not Guarantee A Good Politics This is personal and professional.  My wife and I have the third edition of our comparative economics textbook now in press at MIT Press.  We have chapters on transition economies, and one is on  the Polish economy.  The standard story is that Poland has been the great success story of transition (now accepted to be over pretty much everywhere for awhile now).  It adopted largely...

Its almost Christmas.  What seems to be different in the last couple of years is that we now have to contend with the joy of violent Christmas plots of one sort or another.  Just the other day, some $#%& with a scheme to shoot up San Francisco for the holidays was arrested.  Not that the growing terrorism in parts of the West is a seasonal thing, mind you. Putting up bollards seems to be a growth industry these days. But there has to be a better way...

by Diane Coyle,  Professor of Economics at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom, GDP: Falling Short  (from IMF website here ) Gross domestic product, or GDP, has been used to measure growth since the Second World War when economies were all about mass production and manufacturing. In this podcast, economist Diane Coyle, says GDP is less well suited to measure progress in today’s digital economy. “I think the issue for GDP comes if the pace...

by Mike Kimel   (from 2012) Tax Rates v. Real GDP Growth Rates, a Scatter Plot   This post was submitted by Kaleberg. In this post, I will look at the relationship between top marginal income tax rates and real GDP growth using a scatter plot. I am inordinately fond of scatter plots. The nice thing about a scatter plot is that you can present a lot of data in a fairly small space, so rather than just comparing tax rates at time period t against real GDP...

by Hale Stewart  (originally published at Bonddad blog) Why Would Anybody Invest When Capacity Utilization is This Low? A central selling point of the tax bill is that it will encourage investment.  But that assumes that high tax rates were the primary reason why business wasn’t investing.  Instead, the data says business investment is weak because the U.S. has a ton of spare capacity. First, let’s look total capacity utilization: It has peaked at...

GOP Congress: my (wealthy) donors made me do it The GOP’s tax-complicating, deficit-increasing, wealthy-subsidizing, Arctic destroying, Health Care damaging, $1.5 trillion tax “reform” package is unpopular with most Americans, destructive to the government’s ability to fund needed programs from disease prevention to FEMA to basic research to needed infrastructure improvements, and wildly popular with the wealthy GOP donors like the (oil-rich) Koch...