The Angry Bear

This post is largely a comment on a New York Times editorial “The Right Way To Cut Corporate Taxes”. I disagree with the Times’s editorial board. Key parts of the editorial are “If Republicans worked with Democrats, they could reach a compromise to lower the top corporate tax rate to between 25 percent and 28 percent, eliminated loopholes and reduced the incentive businesses have to take on debt, rather than to use equity to expand.” Grammar Nazi notes...

This is going to be a very long post with independent chapters (I won’t impose by making a series of posts) I. What is “Ricardian Equivalence” The basic idea is that the timing of taxes has no effect on anything, and especially not on consumption/saving choices, because rational economic agents know that the state has a budget constraint which is binding and anticipate their share of paying for the national debt. This idea is clearly crazy. Even Ricardo...

Freedom of Speech for Fascists? I just finished reading the Chronicle of Higher Ed’s profile of Mark Bray, author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook.  I don’t know how accurate it is as a portrayal of Bray and his ideas, but it seems like a sober, fair-minded overview of the debate over anti-fascist tactics and freedom of speech. What the article doesn’t say, however, is that there are two very different bases for opposing public appearances by white...

Two thoughts on the Virginia election: it’s the net strong disapproval,stupid! But is the primary driver education or age? It’s a slow week for economic news, but we sure had some electoral fireworks on Tuesday! Since I am a data nerd, here are two metrics from Virginia that caught my attention, which I’ll discuss in reverse order. I. Is it education or is it age? Here are two graphs showing how the elections broke down: First, by racial makeup of...

The Guardian newspaper has a story about wages in England: A shortage of factory workers is starting to push up pay rates but wage rises in the services sector remain rooted at around 2%, according to the latest feedback from the Bank of England’s regional agents. The central bank said its agents, which are based in offices across the country, found that shortages this month across the manufacturing sector were leading to a “slight increase in pay growth”...

President Trump Must Release His Tax Returns I know, boring boring boring old news. But now that he has had his hind end kicked by the recent off-off election results, it is time to get real. He has managed to cover up massive amounts of crimes and violations of ethical norms because he has violated so many. Nobody could keep track of them. But now that he has his behind kicked, and Mueller is zeroing in on him, it is time for him to deal with his most...

I honestly surfed here just to see if anyone was still interested in inflation expectations now that The Fed has shifted from extraordinary efforts to stimulate to normal efforts to take away the punch bowl before workers get uppity. I was pleased to find the post by Bonddad immediately below However, I don’t agree entirely with Hale Stewart and agree less with Stephan Poloz. The first point is that expected US inflation has been very stable and very...

by Hale Stewart (originally published at Bonddad blog) This is Why Inflation Expectations Are So Important Canadian Central Bank Head Poloz: The underlying trend in inflation is driven by the laws of supply and demand, which are as applicable today as they ever were. Excess demand pushes inflation up; excess supply pushes inflation down. Central banks exploit this relationship, working to create excess demand or excess supply in the economy, to target...

I found this segment of interest from Fox News…while I differ on the generic federal deficit thinking, I notice while Obamacare repeal was ‘do or die’, Smith noticed the eight years of Republicans calling doom from the federal deficit gets hardly a peep. [embedded content] Student loan deductions and credits disappear, among a list. as well…his affect is telling.

(Dan here…lifted from AB 2012) Small businesses, tax cuts, and reporting Dan Crawford | November 29, 2012  I sometimes get the ‘eyes rolling’ reaction from people in my social sphere when I insist that at least linking to  original documents is important, and that someone needs to follow up on what an author says someone else says (as a way to gain traction and authority status for their own writing, such as saying the non-partisan Tax Policy Centers...