The Angry Bear

I do not understand the silence of the Democrats when it comes to dealing with the issues of this country such as student debt, the attacks by Trump and Republicans on the ACA, the Republican and Trump tax reform plan giving $billions to the 1% of the taxpayers making greater than $500,000 annually, the more recent plan allowing states to invoke job requirements and premiums upon those on Medicaid, etc. Then there is the latest utterance from the White...

Minority unemployment: progress vs. prejudice On this Martin Luther King Day, let’s take a look at minority unemployment. This got a little attention earlier this month when the December jobs report showed the smallest gap ever between the unemployment rates of blacks and whites. So let’s start by confirming the good news.  Indeed last month saw the smallest gap ever between the unemployment rates of the two groups: The secular trend over the last 40...

Are Voters In Nations With A Poland Problem Especially Sophisticated?  The argument here is that a nation with a Poland problem has a disconnect between its economic conditions and its political  outcomes.  It could be argued that in such a case the voters of that nation may realize that elected leaders (especially presidents in the US) have much less control over economic outcomes than voters in most nations give them credit or blame for.  So they vote...

Jason Schwartz buries the lede in this genuinely alarming article in Politico “Study: Americans view media negatively, can’t agree on meaning of ‘fake news'” I attempt to excavate it. The study — the 2017 Gallup/Knight Foundation Survey on Trust, Media and Democracy, based on mailed-in responses from more than 19,000 Americans age 18 or older — asked people to rate whether four categories of information were “Always,” “Sometimes” or “Never” fake news....

Real wages in 2017 Now that we have the report on consumer prices for December, let’s take a look at what happened with real wages in 2017. Consumer prices increased +0.1% in December, and wages for non-managerial workers rose 0.3%,  This for that month the average worker earned 0.2% more. For the year, the nominal wages of non-managerial workers rose 2.4%, while prices increased 2.1%, meaning that for the entire year workers saw a whopping 0.3%...

Via Marketwatch Jamie Galbraith states his thoughts on a how the current US economy functions.  Here are a few snippets: University of Texas economist Galbraith, the son of the famous Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith, believes mainstream economists and the Federal Reserve are too wedded to old ideas to see what is really going on in the economy. Specifically, Galbraith is worried that the consumer is the only game in town — and that can’t last....

Via Alternet: 4 Ways Martin Luther King Was More Radical Than You Thought The slain civil rights leader was a critic of capitalism, the Vietnam War, and championed reproductive rights. By Igor Volsky / ThinkProgress January 20, 2014, 7:32 AM GMT Every January, Martin Luther King, Jr. is universally honored as a national hero who preached a peaceful fight against racial injustice. This saintly image is quite a departure from the kind of attacks the...

A Reminder That It Was George W. Bush Who Was Responsible For Letting North Korea Get Nuclear Weapons Tyler Cowen on Marginal Revolution has provided a link to a 2004 article from Washington Monthly by Fred Kaplan that lays out in great detail how George W. Bush, strongly backed by Cheney and Rumsfeld and against the views of Colin Powell, undid the agreement that Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton made with the North Koreans in 1994 to shut down the North’s...