The Angry Bear

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...

Today is the fifth anniversary of the slaughter of the innocents at Sandy Hook Elementary School. 20 children between the ages of 6 and seven years old were shot dead as well as six adults who tried to protect them. All because this country’s politicians believes there is nothing which can be done to prevent this from happening and are in the pockets of the NRA. Not a good day in the history of the United States. And still when these preventable...

“The FCC voted 3-2 Thursday to repeal net neutrality rules, ending Obama-era regulations that prohibited Internet providers from blocking or slowing web content. Whereas all Internet traffic previously shared same ‘lane,’ it can now be split among different lanes with different speeds. Those differing speeds could hurt telemedicine since it requires a ‘pretty robust connection,’ said Mei Kwong, interim executive director and policy advisor for the Center...

(Dan here…Lifted from Robert’s Stochastic Thoughts) Sunday, December 03, 2017 Republicans Reject the NFL, the CIA and the FBI I forget who said she never expected that, after the national divorce, liberals would get custody of the NFL. But it’s beyond that. Now Republicans reject the CIA and the FBI too. Donald Trump sometimes sounds like a paranoid 60s hippy claiming he is being persecuted by the evil FBI (except some of them really were persecuted).So...

by Hale Stewart (originally published at Bonddadd blog) The Ugly Picture of US Wage Growth The chart above shows the Y/Y percentage change in the average hourly earnings of nonsupervisory employees.  We can break this data down into two sections.  Due to higher inflation and stronger unions, the pace of growth was far stronger before the 1980s. We see a different dynamic at work during the first three post-1982 expansions.  Wages decline coming out...

The Utterly Terrible GOP Tax “Reform” Scam The Republicans in the House and Senate continue on their downhill rush to pass their so-called “tax reform” plan before the holiday break.  It’s a mad rush to nowhere, a corrupt process of “please the oligarch” that will cause a huge deficit increase (on the scale of $1 to $1.5 TRILLION over ten years) and be used by the Ryan, McConnell and Trump cadre of liars to justify a domino effect of Medicare, Medicaid,...