The Angry Bear

Mitch McConnell and the Republicans in the Senate are not satisfied with the Tom Price appointed CBO chief, who insists that there are four fingers in front of his face and apparently won’t make numbers up to help take away health insurance from 22 million people. So Mitch McConnell and the Republicans will rely upon, and I am not making this up, “ALTERNATIVE SCORING” to further the Ted Cruz amendment to Obamacare repeal through the Senate. Republicans are...

Dan here….Steve Roth in 2014 How Do Households Build Wealth? Probably Not the Way You Think. Three Graphs Steve Roth | October 28, 2014 12:52 pm US/GLOBAL ECONOMICS Work hard. Save your money. Spend less than you earn. That’s how you become wealthy, right? That’s not totally wrong, but if you think that’s the whole story — or even a large part of the story – you may be surprised by this graph: (Note: these are not realized capital gains, which really only...

« Back I am reposting this at Dan’s suggestion as it relates to the recent post by Steve Roth.  I have edited it slightly along with a retitle to clean up some wording and hopefully have made it easier to read.  For those new here, my posts started with income inequality and a thought that we changed our economy as to how we would make money starting in the 80′s.   My one new thought is that the obvious political party to promote policy that addresses the...

A thought for Sunday: Trump voters and the “peasant mentality” I am currently reading a comprehensive tome on 19th century European history, “The Pursuit of Power,” by Richard J. Evans. One episode that made a big impression on me was the decision by Otto von Bismarck (no conservative he) upon the establishment of the German Confederation, to eschew property qualifications for the franchise for the Reichstag and embrace universal male suffrage (p. 257).  Why?...

Former Ohio official who accidentally released Social Security numbers is on Trump’s voter fraud panel LA TImes reports: The Republican gubernatorial primary was just weeks away, and then-Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell had his sights set on securing the nomination. Blackwell had served as mayor of Cincinnati and state treasurer before becoming Ohio’s top elections official, so a bid for governor in 2006 seemed a logical next step in his political...

by Steve Roth (Lifted from Asymptosis) How Perfect Markets Concentrate Wealth and Strangle Growth and Prosperity June 5th, 2016 Capitalism concentrates wealth. Ridicule Marx and his latter-day disciples all you like (I’ll help); he definitely got that right. But capitalism is a big word with lots of meanings, and enough ideological baggage to fill a Lear Jet. Let’s talk about something more precise: perfect markets, with ownership, in which individuals...

Via Brad DeLong comes two posts with observations that add to the discussion on our observations of the economic conditions driven by human nature: Figure 1 Paul Krugman points us to this notion: Should-Read: Paul Krugman (2015): WHEN VALUES DISAPPEAR: “Back in the 60s and 70s… there was much talk about the disintegration of… African-American values… https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/03/11/when-values-disappear/ …and how that was the root cause of...

Self Control is one of the defining music hits of the 1980s. It was first released in 1984 by Italian singer-songwriter Raf (his first single). It was also released almost contemporaneously by Laura Brannigan. The song includes these lyrics: You take my self you take my self control I I live among the creatures of the night I haven’t got the will to try and fight The first line of the quote I provided is wrong. Not in the sense that those words aren’t lyrics...

June jobs report: great headline, but once again where are the wages?!? HEADLINES: +222,000 jobs added U3 unemployment rate rose +0.1% from 4.3% to 4.4% U6 underemployment rate rose +0.2% from 8.4% to 8.6% Here are the headlines on wages and the chronic heightened underemployment: Wages and participation rates Not in Labor Force, but Want a Job Now: down -130,000 from 5.561 million to 5.431 million Part time for economic reasons: up +107,000 from 5.219...