The Angry Bear

As a follow up to my post on homicides in 2016, I decided to combine homicide data from the FBI with figures from the police shooting database from the Washington Post. The only difficulty is that the FBI classifies people as being from Black, White, Other, or Unknown races, whereas the Washington Post breaks out other groups, such as Hispanic. Because Hispanic people can be Black, White, or Other (as per FBI classfication), it is necessary to assign...

Wow! Yellin confirms 2% inflation is the Fed’s ceiling You may have already seen this elsewhere, but in case you didn’t, Janet Yellin all but officially confirmed the other day that 2% isn’t in fact the Fed’s target, it’s their ceiling. Per the New York Times: Given that monetary policy affects economic activity and inflation with a substantial lag, it would be imprudent to keep monetary policy on hold until inflation is back to 2 percent,” Ms. Yellen...

The FBI just released data on homicides for 2016. In light of the various protests by the BLM and now football players, I thought I’d provide a a graph.  It breaks out population, homicide perpetrators and homicide victims by race. (click to embiggen) Note… the number of offenders exceeds the number of victims. This is a result of some homicides involving multiple perpetrators. This can happen, for example, if both the shooter and the getaway driver in a...

It could . . . With the Senate vote tomorrow canceled on the Graham – Cassidy ACA defunding bill, the effort to defund and repeal the ACA will cease for the rest of this budget year ending September 30, 2017. With the passage of a new budget and a new resolution the effort could go onward in an attempt to repeal the ACA. As I have said, there can only be one resolution per year. Let me clarify the one reconciliation per budget year statement. Unless...

Worse Than The Usual Hypocrisy: Trump, Puerto Rico, And The Jones Act The Jones Act was passed 97 years ago to protect US shipping within the US from foreign-made ships.  I doubt I ever would have supported such an act, but at least back then there were plenty of US-made ships to fulfill the demand. Despite the Jones Act, the US shipping industry has collapsed in the last century so that the number of such ships is far below demand in normal...

Being a parent of a child under 16 means trying to figure out ways to get said child from here to there, say from school to home, and from home to after school activities, and then back. There is often a fair amount of juggling involved – one or more, er, “caregivers” are typically involved in the process To an economist, therefore, being able to put a child in a self-driving car means, potentially, more output in the economy. That’s a parent or...

Last 21 Days ACA Healthcare History On September 7th and shortly after Pelosi and Schumer decided to be nonpartisan and help Republicans who still had an ounce of decency to pass hurricane Harvey aid and set a new National Debt Limit, I wrote about the inherent dangers of being so magnanimous. Lets face it, during the Obama 8 years, Republicans made it a vow even before he took office to oppose everything coming from the other side of the aisle even...