The Angry Bear

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...

Black Mirror Big Data Becomes Big Brother In China And maybe coming soon to the US as well, enough to make Orwell sit up and take notice. The first show of the 2016 season of the sci fi TV show, “Black Mirror,” called “Nosedive,” showed a future society where people have overall social scores (1-5) that are constantly being changed based on what they do and who they interact with and how.  Access to many things is based on one’s rating.  The female lead...

The 2021 Omnibus Repealer and Clawback Act A saving grace of 2017 — up until now — is that Trump and the GOP have been the Keystone Kops of Kleptocracy, consistently faceplanting in attempts at regressive domestic legislation. With the passage of the GOP tax bill, that all changes. Not only is it a massive giveaway to the corporations and the wealthy who least need assistance, it actually raises taxes over time over many if not most lower and middle class...

Do GOP House and Senate reps even know what they voted for? The House passed the awful “tax complication bill of 2017” on Tuesday.  The Senate had to make a few changes because it didn’t comply with the Byrd rules, and then will presumably pass it today. It’ll go back to the House where the HOuse will then take the final vote on the Senate changes and send it to Mr. Trump for signature. The GOP will claim that they have singlehandedly put together a...

The Missing Piece in Plans for an All-Electric Vehicle Fleet: Electricity The New York Times has a piece today on barriers to the replacement of internal combustion-powered vehicles to an all-electric fleet in the United States.  It talks about production costs, the availability of key minerals and the need for a charging station infrastructure, but it oddly passes over the most obvious impediment, at least from the perspective of climate change, the...