The Angry Bear

Dan here…a reminder about our federal deficit. Deficits Do Matter, But Not the Way You Think 07.20.10    Roosevelt institute  L. Randall Wray In recent months, a form of mass hysteria has swept the country as fear of “unsustainable” budget deficits replaced the earlier concern about the financial crisis, job loss, and collapsing home prices. What is most troubling is that this shift in focus comes even as the government’s stimulus package winds down and...

Hurricane adjusted initial claims for week of Sept. 2: 239,000 Last week I promised I would repeat an exercise I first undertook in 2012 when Superstorm Sandy disrupted the initial claims data: estimating what the initial jobless claims would have been, but for the hurricane. In 2012 I created that adjustment by backing out the affected states (NY and NJ) from the non-seasonally adjusted data.  That gave me the number of initial claims filed in the other...

On September 7, I pointed out Republicans are preparing Another Assault on the PPACA/ACA in 2017. Republican senators Lindsey Graham S.C. and Bill Cassidy LA are making a last stand in an effort to repeal and replace the ACA by “proposing legislation doing away with many of the subsidies and mandates of the 2010 law. Instead, the Graham – Cassidy Bill would provide block grants to the states to help individuals pay for health coverage. Graham taking it...

by Peter Dorman  (originally published at Econospeak) Price Gouging Whenever there’s a natural disaster, a famine or some other such crisis, people zero in on price gouging.  Are grain merchants jacking up prices to take advantage of a food shortage?  What about airlines raising fares to cash in on desperate attempts to flee an impending hurricane, or stores that double or triple the price on bottled water?  And generators that suddenly only the rich can...

With the the recent Equifax data theft fiasco, I thought of a post I wrote 10 years ago: Based on a conversation I had with reader Debbie, I was thinking about identity theft for the last day or so. I also had a discussion with the Ex-GF (for new readers, that’s my wife) about this; she was the victim of identity theft at one point. Its a big deal in this society, and I think I have a potential solution… If someone steals someone else’s identity, their...

WHO OWNS THE WEALTH IN TAX HAVENS?, an NBER working paper, points to following the money: Drawing on newly published macroeconomic statistics, this paper estimates the amount of household wealth owned by each country in offshore tax havens. The equivalent of 10% of world GDP is held in tax havens globally, but this average masks a great deal of heterogeneity—from a few percent of GDP in Scandinavia, to about 15% in Continental Europe, and 60% in Gulf...

It Is Monday, And WaPo Bashes Social Security Again What a surprise, the Washington Post is at it again, and it is the usual culprit, Robert J. Samuelson. Of course he has his attack buried under a title that appears to point more broadly, “The deficit is everybody’s fault,” although not if “everybody” includes people who die before they become eligible for Social Security and Medicare (and those parts of Medicaid that go to old people).  He even has...

“If you tax investment income what will people do? Stuff their money in the mattress?” Steve Roth | October 15, 2012 9:25 pm Richard Thaler asks exactly the right question. This from the latest IGM Forum poll of big-name economists, on the effects of taxing income from “capital.” I’ve been over this multiple times before, but it’s nice to see the thinking validated by a real economist. If you’ve got money, there is no (practicable) alternative to...

This can’t be healthy: Matthew Halls was removed as artistic director of the Oregon Bach Festival following an incident in which he imitated a southern American accent while talking to his longstanding friend, the African-American classical singer Reginald Mobley. It is understood a white woman who overheard the joke reported it to officials at the University of Oregon, which runs the festival, claiming it amounted to a racial slur. Here are the mechanics...