The Angry Bear

Cause and effect leaves little room for how people want the world to work.  Here are two stories illustrating that. From Bloomberg: A Swiss maker of hamburger buns for McDonald’s Corp. said it’s struggling to run a Chicago bakery after it lost a third of its workers in a clampdown on 800 immigrants without sufficient documentation. About 35 percent of the workers at Cloverhill Bakery had to be replaced, according to Zurich-based Aryzta AG. The company,...

of His Constituents. Iowa Republican Senator Grassley came out publically stating he wants to eliminate the estate tax to help Iowan farmers stay on their family farms. In rebuttal, the Des Moines Register had this to say: Of the numbers of Iowans paying the estate tax, they can be quantified in the dozens each year. Out of the 1.45 million Iowans filing federal tax returns, the numbers of Iowans over the last five years paying estate taxes numbers...

The Great Awokening There’s a theory about the sins and shortcomings of society: they are all due to our failures of consciousness. If people were purer, given to understanding and following the true path, the problems of this world would cease to exist. According to this view, poverty and inequality are the result of greed, wars occur because people fail to see the humanity in the “enemy”, and bigotry feeds on fear and ignorance. The solution is to...

Pharmacy chain CVS Health has agreed to buy health insurer Aetna for $69 billion in cash and stock, retaining its current management, the companies announced late Sunday. The deal brings together one of the largest providers of pharmacy services with the No. 3 U.S. health insurer, which together would establish a healthcare giant with more than $240 billion in annual revenue. The CVS-Aetna deal would likely give the combined company bargaining power in...

(Dan here…lifted from an e-mail) I’m not registered with seeking alpha so I cannot read the whole article (I had sent), but what I read looks a lot like what I’ve written over the years.  Here are some statements which, working off memory, I have written posts about and which I think are supported by US macroeconomic data from the last 100 years: 1.  A tax cut generally gooses the economy in the short run (one – two years). That story is a Republican...

Also know as collectors vintage bitcoins. This is a crazy idea with no redeeming social value. BitCoin is valuable only because people expect it to be valuable in the future. I am sure there is BitCoin bubble, but it wouldn’t be that strange for for something useless to be valuable. Cancelled stamps may be valuable. Old coins have numismatic value. Old coins hmmm … pity BitCoins are just numbers uh first recorded on a given date … hmmm OK so I want to...

Flynn Bails, but Don’t Get Your Hopes Up I haven’t seen anything yet to convince me that the Putin-Trump collaboration was a big deal.  Ugly and unprincipled, sure, but politically consequential, probably not. A contrary view, expressed by Harry Litman in today’s New York Times, is that this is the beginning of the end for the Trumpster.  The evidence is accumulating that, between his election in November of last year and his inauguration on January 20...

It appears almost certain that the ACA (Obamacare) mandate will be eliminated. This actually means that Obamacare will correspond to Obama’s 2008 proposal which didn’t include a mandate. Obama claimed it would work (he was lying or, to be polite, playing 11 dimensional chess). Can ACA without a mandate work at all ? Can it be modiefied so that it works better ? People who know a hell of a lot more than I do about health economics have struggled with...

[embedded content] Douglas Holz-Eakin balanced with Kimberly A. Clausing in the NYT.   Link in the picture.  To think that looting could be so calmly described with ballance.