The Angry Bear

Of Memorial Day and Confederate statues Memorial Day is a particularly fitting time to write about the issue of Confederate monuments. That’s because Memorial Day originated as a day set aside to honor the Civil War dead, not just those who fought for the Union, but those on both sides, including those who died in service of the Confederacy.  It was part of the process of magnanimous victory which enabled the country to heal, perhaps epitomized nowhere better...

One of the topics I’ve railed about many times during the decade and change in which I’ve been blogging is that society would be much better off if we forced people to pay the cost of negative externalities they impose on other people through their behavior. An obvious example would be making polluters pay for the cost that the pollution they emit inflicts on everyone else. But it turns out there are a lot of these behavioral externalities in healthcare. For...

Some Saudi-US History Given Donald Trump’s new commitment to support military adventurism by Saudi Arabia in Yemen and more generally against Iran, it might be worth reconsidering how this alliance developed. The beginning for Saudi Arabia was in 1744 when a wandering radical cleric, Mohammed bin Abdel-Wahhab met up with a local chieftain, Mohammed bin Saud in the village of Diriyah, whose ruins are now located in the suburbs of the current Saudi Arabian...

This very important paper “Moving to Opportunity” is well summarized by the discussant. Baby this town rips the bones from your back It’s a death trap, it’s a suicide rap We gotta get [them] out while [they]‘re young `Cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run [regressions] As noted by the discussant, the authors find that the benefits for young children of moving out of high poverty areas are very large. In contrast moving in ones teens helps girls but...

by Dale Coberly MAYA MACGUINEAS COMMITTEE FOR A RESPONSIBLE FEDERAL BUDGET (CRFB) TALKS BACKWARDS ABOUT SOCIAL SECURITY IN THE NEW YORK TIMES…NOBODY THE WISER Here is what she said: “and “protecting” Social Security and Medicare, a reassuring political promise that removes over one-third of the budget from consideration.” “trying to square the circle of balancing the budget while taking the largest contributors to spending growth — Social Security and...

Marginalized populations and employment during expansions Dean Baker ran a graph over the weekend showing an apparent conundrum: namely, that in the last several years there has been an increase in the percentage of those employed who only have a high school diploma vs. a slight *decrease* in employment among those with a college degree.  Here’s his graph: This caught my attention, because I actually don’t think this is such an anomaly.  So I went back and...

From a story in The Globe and Mail The 22-year-old Mr. Abedi was identified Tuesday by Manchester police as the suspected bomber. British media reported that he was born in Manchester to parents who fled the violent repression of Moammar Gadhafi’s Libya. Little else is known about Mr. Abedi – British authorities have been tight-lipped about the investigation and only released Mr. Abedi’s name after it was leaked by U.S. officials – but his profile as the...

by Joseph Joyce Capital Flows and Domestic Responses The international impact of financial shocks became apparent during the global financial crisis. But how do financial flows affect economic conditions during non-crisis times? And are there ways to shelter the domestic economy from these flows? Some new evidence from the IMF seeks to answer these questions. IMF economists Bertrand Gruss, Malhar Nabar and Marcos Poplawski-Ribeiro, in a chapter in the IMF’s...

I didn’t think they could shock me. Then I read that the Trump OMB made a $2,000,000,000,000 arithmetic mistake Jon Chait explains “One of the ways Donald Trump’s budget claims to balance the budget over a decade, without cutting defense or retirement spending, is to assume a $2 trillion increase in revenue through economic growth. This is the magic of the still-to-be-designed Trump tax cuts. But wait — if you recall, the magic of the Trump tax cuts is also...