The Angry Bear

This chart caught my fancy after reading the interview with Rep. Tom Cole from the previous post. There is still the tendency to see the stock market (or GDP) as a proxy for the economy. And it is a time honored tradition for politicians to claim credit for economic gain in convoluted story telling: (I could not find the attribution for this graph but will add when I find it) Trump bump versus Obama effect on the stock market for the first nine months in...

A big change that has occurred in my household this year is the amount of shopping we do online – it has gone up a lot. It extends to food – a significant part of my daily calories now get delivered to our house. It isn’t just price driving that change; some of what we order online is very difficult to obtain locally. In fact, it was looking for items I wanted to add to my diet for health reasons that catalyzed this shift to online shopping. What...

An interview on CNBC with Rep.Tom Cole offers some insight into the path to voting yes on the tax bill… Alhough mainstream forecasters like the Joint Committee on Taxation and University of Pennsylvania have issued unflattering analyses of GOP proposals, Cole says his tax-committee colleagues tell him other models offer sunnier results in line with his core belief that lower taxes boost the economy… … He doesn’t know what those models are, but doesn’t...

In a rough way this calculator attempts to categorize who get cuts and who pays more: New York Times tax calculator

The GOP Tax Bill Disses the Working Class Here’s something about the GOP House and the GOP Senate:  they each passed tax bills (supposed to come out in a “conference” agreement sometime today) that diss the United States’ working class taxpayers.  White or black, Christian or Jew or other, citizen by birth or naturalized citizen–workers are treated as an inferior “taker” class and owners are treated as a superior “maker” class–the same old GOP class...

The text of the GOP tax complication legislation The Republicans, after holding one sham “public hearing” on their conference bill (without any text released) have on late Friday released the text of their (Republicans only) agreed-upon final bill that will be put to a House and Senate vote as early as Tuesday, December 19, even though there is no score from the Congressional Budget Office or analysis from the Joint Committee on Taxation. Here’s the...

Trump administration has forbade the usage certain words; “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” “transgender,” “fetus,” “evidence-based” and “science-based” from being used in CDC reports. I wonder what is up next, the burning of books? The Trump administration AND Repubs keep establishing new boundaries for their reach into American lives. Trump’s Chief of Staff Jim Kelly told the analysts that “certain words” in the CDC’s budget drafts were being...

The Republican Party’s Heartlessness–the Casualty Loss Provision of the purported “tax reform” legislation The GOP is cruising towards passage of its class warfare tax legislation that continues the long trend of Republican tax policy to redistribute upwards to the very rich.  The legislation, however, is supported by a small minority of the American public (latest polls put support for the tax legislation at less than 30%). See, e.g., Allan...

Real wages stagnate YoY, decline significantly since July So lackluster has wage growth been that even the modest uptick in consumer inflation to 2.2% YoY in November means that non-managerial workers have seen virtually no real growth in their paychecks over the last 12 months. With yesterday’s +0.4% increase in consumer prices, here’s what YoY real wages look like for non-managers (blue) and all employees including managers (red): All wages...