The Angry Bear

Robert Samuelson At The Washington Post Is Bashing Social Security Yet Again Yet again. I grant that he did not do  it at length or present a lot of clearly incorrect nonsense.  But bash Social Security he did, using an old ruse to do so, combining it with Medicare to invoke a long term deficit danger due to the two of them together, when in fact it is well known that it is the Medicare part of that projection of future spending that leads to all the scary...

Via Naked Capitalism comes Daniel Gros, Director of the Centre for European Policy Studies, Brussels. Originally published at VoxEU. Here is the introductory summary: Trade and international financial transactions have grown massively in recent decades. This phenomenon, also called globalization, is often described as a ‘mega-trend’. Business and political leaders never tire of repeating that ‘globalization’ is the future, that it delivers more jobs and...

Comments on Profit and Capital Yeah, I know, Marx wrote three volumes on this, and in 2014 Piketty published in English a more than 700 page book on it that ended up on the bestseller list, although neither of these resolved the long-running debates about the nature of profit or of capital, which continue to swirl.  We have seen recently someone claiming that distinguishing between retained and distributed earnings is the key to understanding profit, and...

Reader EM put this comment up in the AB open thread. I thought it was interesting enough to place on AB as I also wonder about the question being asked and the answer; “can a state divert Medicare funds to support a state single payer system?” The simple answer is “no,” Medicare funds can not be allocated to states and the same holds true for VA funding for healthcare and the tax credit to companies for healthcare insurance. Congress would have to approve it...

Muhammed Bin Nayef Bin Abdulaziz Al Sa’ud Confined To His Palace In Jidda, according to the New York Times today.  So the story about the now deposed 57-year old former Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia and former Minister of the Interior, Muhammed bin Nayef (MbN), putting out a video supporting his own removal appears to be phony propaganda.  The Saudis instead have been broadcasting a video of the new Crown Prince, 31-year old Muhammed bin Salman (MbS) kissing...

Sandwichman in the FT Financial Times: “The minimum wage wars are heating up: A new study fails to prove its claim that Seattle wage floor hurts workers” by Martin Sandbu, at Free Lunch on FT Alphaville First, the numerical result struggles to pass an intuitive “smell test”. As the Angry Bear blog [cross posted at EconoSpeak!] points out, employment in Seattle was booming throughout the period: average wages increased by 18 per cent (!) in the time covered by...

I used to live in Little Rock,  so waking up this morning to the news of the shooting in Little Rock was a bit of a shock.  Fortunately, the expletive expletive who did the shooting was a bad shot and nobody got killed. I don’t even know how to comment on this, though, so I’m going to just to put it up… This is a screenshot I just took from the night club’s website which shows the act that was performing last night. I guess what with the events of the last...

A just-released paper by the Behavioral Economics Team of the Australian Government (BETA) looks at hiring processes in the Australian Public Service Commission. Here’s the summary: This study assessed whether women and minorities are discriminated against in the early stages of the recruitment process for senior positions in the APS, while also testing the impact of implementing a ‘blind’ or de-identified approach to reviewing candidates. Over 2,100 public...

Dan here…I don’t usually pass along a study that has a company attached to the article itself, but thought this one might be of interest for readers. On government handouts sports, stadiums or schools is the political side of the issue. Stadiums or Schools: An Analysis of Public Expenditures What we found is that ten states have allocated public funds to fund new professional sports stadiums since 2008. This does not include state expenditures on collegiate...