The Angry Bear

[embedded content] Barkley Rosser: This anniversary is a matter of more concern for Angry Bear than the assassinations of other famous people of the past. Let us remember this and honor his struggles in all their aspects on this sad anniversary. “I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the Promised Land.” February 1968, 1,300 Sanitation Workers of Memphis went on strike for better working conditions and...

A Half Century Ago Today  A half century ago today Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot dead in Memphis, Tennessee.  This remains one of the saddest events in our history.  This will not be a long post other than remembering this event that ended the life of this great man.  I have only two observations. One is that in yesterday’s Washington Post there was a long article about how King’s family believe he was not shot by James Earl Ray and that it was...

Our Depleted National Defense Budget? Our title is perhaps the most obnoxious line in the Hoover Five oped per some of the appropriately harsh comments to Cochrane’s post, which alas I did not cover here. Before I do so, let me turn the microphone over to Jonathan Chait: It is a foundational belief of Republican Party doctrine that tax cuts cannot have any adverse impact on the national debt. Indeed, Republicans have invented a new language in which...

A thought for Sunday: 2018 arctic ice cover The National Snow and Ice Data Center reports that the peak in arctic ice cover this winter was the second lowest on record, just slightly above that of one year ago. The three next lowest peaks were in the three years just prior: All of these are something like three standard deviations below the norm from 1980-2010. The biggest abnormality this winter was that the Bering Sea between Alaska and Siberia...

A note on personal income and spending Personal income and spending data from February intimates a weak Q1 GDP report, but doesn’t suggest any imminent downturn. The first graph below compares real personal spending with real retail sales: Real retail sales have pulled back from their autumn surge, and real personal spending has also declined slightly from its last peak in December. But we’ve had similar small drawbacks before, as in early 2012 and...

Paul Krugman is characteristically and very admirably willing to discuss in this pdf what he got wrong. In particular, he now thinks that in the 1990s he underestimated the medium costs to the USA of globalization. This is especially striking, because his debate with Bill Clinton et al on this topic was uh rather heated. Brad DeLong uncharacteristically disagrees with Krugman. Uncharacteristically, I don’t agree entirely with Paul Krugman. It is...

Why “Entitlement” Cuts and Not Tax Increases Again? John Cochrane has to remind us that he co-authored a really bizarre oped: Unless Congress acts to reduce federal budget deficits, the outstanding public debt will reach $20 trillion a scant five years from now, up from its current level of $15 trillion. That amounts to almost a quarter of million dollars for a family of four, more than twice the median household wealth. This string of perpetually rising...

(Dan here…Lifted from Econospeak) Anniversary of Yeshua bin Yusuf dying on a cross. Today is “Good Friday” for most of established world ruling Christianity. It is indeed the recognition of the single most historically realistically accepted event of the life of this world historical individual, his death on the cross a bit under 2000 years ago. Three of the Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and John, two of which reportedly observed this as live personal...