The Angry Bear

May industrial production: no change in trend This was a post I meant to put up Friday, but was pre-empted by the important housing news. May industrial production came in unchanged. But that didn’t stop Doomers, who had been silent about April’s big increase in manufacturing, from trumpeting its 0.4% decline (go ahead, just try to find their acknowledgement of April’s good number. You won’t.). So, let’s put industrial production in perspective. First, here...

I am always curious about why certain people make it a mission to get rid of things. I think it truly is about Addison Mitchell McConnell trying to erase the accomplishments of what the first black President Barack Obama did as the president. I did some rather easy digging and pulled up Wikipedia. here is what they said about Mitch. As a youth, Addison (Mitch) McConnell overcame polio. He received “government-provided healthcare” in Warm Springs saving him...

Diane Ravitch points to the New York State legislature in her blog this week. NY is a Blue State having gone Dem in presidential elections; however, the state legislature is divided with the Dems controlling the Assembly and Repubs the Senate. What makes the New York state legislature interesting is the emergence of a Blue Dog Democrat segment of the State Assembly, which sides with the Senate Republicans on various issues. Blue Dogs (which I kind of like as...

This is a Big Deal: housing permits and starts now a long leading negative I’ll have more to say next week, but let me just drop this right now: this morning’s housing report was a Big Deal. FRED doesn’t have the graphs yet, but here are the numbers from the Census Bureau cite. Graph of starts and permits: Note both have turned down significantly this year. Table of housing starts: The three month rolling average of starts, which smooths out the...

From Kaiser Health News points to other general sources of lead than paint and water: The Environmental Defense Fund, in an analysis of 11 years of federal data, found detectable levels of lead in 20 percent of 2,164 baby food samples. The toxic metal was most commonly found in fruit juices such as grape and apple, root vegetables such as sweet potatoes and carrots, and cookies such as teething biscuits. The organization’s primary focus was on the baby foods...

Via Naked Capitalism comes Brett Robertson’s Why Is PBS Airing Right-Wing-Sponsored School Privatization Propaganda? (Media Matters).  I like Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me and sometimes Car Talk while driving to places, if they happen to be on. Otherwise I tend to avoid listening to Marketplace and the news segments. This has been true for me for a decade anyway.  MA rejected increasing the cap on charter schools.   I found many unaware of the lack of oversight and...

The Hidden Cost of Privatization by Nina Shapiro at Institute for New Economic Thinking  is an excellent read. This conception of government, of course, is not new. “Small government” has been a hallmark of the Republican Party for decades, and the privatization of government properties and services has been increasing worldwide since the 1980s. In the earlier period it centered on the privatization of state-owned enterprises, but in more recent times it has...

It’s Sunday, so I take a break from nerdy econ analysis and speak my mind. Last November 9 we woke up to a living nightmare. The next four years were bound to be awful. The only question was, how awful? The very tiny silver lining as of now is that, so far, it has been about as limited an awful as it could reasonably be. The simple fact is, those things that the Executive could worsen all on his own, he is doing so. But those things that require Legislative...

AEI-Brookings recently issued a report on paid medical leave. I found one of the figures in the paper to be especially interesting: Click to embiggen or to show the entire graph.  (You should see four columns in the graph.)