The Angry Bear

Dan here…I noticed several articles in the NYT (here is one forcasting Trump/Mulvaneys’ Budget Proposal 2017, contrasting safety net program cuts with the Medicare/Social Security deficit busting programs. In an aside no less. Here we go again…as if deficit spending reduction was important to Republicans, and Social Security was one of the chief problems. I am reposting Bruce’s last piece on Budget and deficit from 2014. Also see this post Social Security:...

Real aggregate wage growth finally overtakes Reagan expansion In my opinion the best measure of how average Americans’ situations have improved during an economic expansion is real aggregate wage growth.  This is calculated as follows: average wages per hour for nonsupervisory workers times aggregate hours worked in the economy deflated by the consumer price index This tells us how much more money average Americans are taking home compared with the worst...

Allan Collinge is the founder of the Student Loan Justice Organization a grassroots citizen’s organization dedicated to returning standard consumer protections to student loans. The group was started in March of 2005 and has focused primarily on research, media outreach, and grassroots lobbying initiatives. located in Washington DC. From time to time Angry Bear has publicized Allan efforts to restore bankruptcy protection for student loan. In a rare...

ProGowthLiberal concludes ‘no net increase’ on Saudi Arabian arms deal: The $109 billion in arms sales is for the next decade amounting to an additional $11 billion in new exports on a per annum basis. So we are talking about only 0.06% of GDP in new exports but this only gets worse if we take Tillerson at his word that as the Saudis spend more on their own defense, we spend less. In other words, exports rise by $11 billion per year and Federal purchases fall...

Following up on my post from two weeks ago, Immiseration Revisited, I built a spreadsheet replica of the marvelous Chapman diagram. In addition to lines on the page, the replica provides me with tables of numbers that I can add, subtract, multiply and divide in accordance with the conceptual logic of the diagram. The chart below shows the results of some of these calculations. The red curve graphs cumulative gross “output” and green curve subtracts the value...

Barkley has mentioned this particular article several times now. I would be negligent if I did not post a link to it so we could read it. New Health Care Plan: Open Source Drugs, Immigrant Doctors, and a Public Option, 25 March 2017, CEPR, Beat The Press, Dean Baker. There are two obvious directions to go to get costs down for low- and middle-income families. One is to increase taxes on the wealthy. The other is to reduce the cost of health care. The latter...

by Barkley Rosser “It’s The Economy, Stupid!”: The Iranian Presidential Election “It’s the economy, stupid!” quoth James Carville back in 1992, adviser to Bill Clinton during his successful presidential election campaign then. And so quoth Stella Morgana in an informative piece written a few days ago prior to and about the Iranian presidential election as linked to by Juan Cole The Iranian Election: It’s the Economy, Stupid!. For those who have not seen it...

by New Deal democrat A thought for Sunday: the Left is winning the battle of ideas. The right’s own man says so Prof. Arnold Kling, a conservative neoclassical economist who has taught at George Mason University and been affiliated with the Cato Institute, has a post up this morning in which he  reflects upon whether he has changed his mind about anything in view of developments over the last sum of years. His reply is a notable bellwether: I think that in...

The Minnesota Star Tribute has a bizarre story entitled Minnesota bill against female genital mutilation raises opposition. It begins: Opposition from some members of Minnesota’s immigrant and refugee communities is slowing the momentum of a bill that would impose stiff penalties for parents involved in cases of female genital mutilation. Let’s call it like it is: there are people who are opposed to a law designed to reduce child abuse, and in particular, the...