The Angry Bear

This very important paper “Moving to Opportunity” is well summarized by the discussant. Baby this town rips the bones from your back It’s a death trap, it’s a suicide rap We gotta get [them] out while [they]‘re young `Cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run [regressions] As noted by the discussant, the authors find that the benefits for young children of moving out of high poverty areas are very large. In contrast moving in ones teens helps girls but...

by Dale Coberly MAYA MACGUINEAS COMMITTEE FOR A RESPONSIBLE FEDERAL BUDGET (CRFB) TALKS BACKWARDS ABOUT SOCIAL SECURITY IN THE NEW YORK TIMES…NOBODY THE WISER Here is what she said: “and “protecting” Social Security and Medicare, a reassuring political promise that removes over one-third of the budget from consideration.” “trying to square the circle of balancing the budget while taking the largest contributors to spending growth — Social Security and...

Marginalized populations and employment during expansions Dean Baker ran a graph over the weekend showing an apparent conundrum: namely, that in the last several years there has been an increase in the percentage of those employed who only have a high school diploma vs. a slight *decrease* in employment among those with a college degree.  Here’s his graph: This caught my attention, because I actually don’t think this is such an anomaly.  So I went back and...

From a story in The Globe and Mail The 22-year-old Mr. Abedi was identified Tuesday by Manchester police as the suspected bomber. British media reported that he was born in Manchester to parents who fled the violent repression of Moammar Gadhafi’s Libya. Little else is known about Mr. Abedi – British authorities have been tight-lipped about the investigation and only released Mr. Abedi’s name after it was leaked by U.S. officials – but his profile as the...

by Joseph Joyce Capital Flows and Domestic Responses The international impact of financial shocks became apparent during the global financial crisis. But how do financial flows affect economic conditions during non-crisis times? And are there ways to shelter the domestic economy from these flows? Some new evidence from the IMF seeks to answer these questions. IMF economists Bertrand Gruss, Malhar Nabar and Marcos Poplawski-Ribeiro, in a chapter in the IMF’s...

I didn’t think they could shock me. Then I read that the Trump OMB made a $2,000,000,000,000 arithmetic mistake Jon Chait explains “One of the ways Donald Trump’s budget claims to balance the budget over a decade, without cutting defense or retirement spending, is to assume a $2 trillion increase in revenue through economic growth. This is the magic of the still-to-be-designed Trump tax cuts. But wait — if you recall, the magic of the Trump tax cuts is also...

Dan here…I noticed several articles in the NYT (here is one forcasting Trump/Mulvaneys’ Budget Proposal 2017, contrasting safety net program cuts with the Medicare/Social Security deficit busting programs. In an aside no less. Here we go again…as if deficit spending reduction was important to Republicans, and Social Security was one of the chief problems. I am reposting Bruce’s last piece on Budget and deficit from 2014. Also see this post Social Security:...

Real aggregate wage growth finally overtakes Reagan expansion In my opinion the best measure of how average Americans’ situations have improved during an economic expansion is real aggregate wage growth.  This is calculated as follows: average wages per hour for nonsupervisory workers times aggregate hours worked in the economy deflated by the consumer price index This tells us how much more money average Americans are taking home compared with the worst...