Tag Archives: Featured Stories

Word is circulating that Stephen Miller is writing Donald Trump’s speech on race relations. I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that Trump’s “solution” to the current malaise in the U.S. will involve extending a ban on immigration and expanding enforcement and expulsion of undocumented individuals. This seems like a safe bet to me because Miller really is a one-trick pony and Trump relishes rehashing his greatest hits. Maybe Miller will toss in some...

“Ryan is looking down right now, and you know that, and he is very happy, because I think he just broke a record.” “Hopefully George is looking down right now and saying this is a great thing that’s happening for our country,” Trump’s cynical invoking of George Floyd yesterday has a history that explains what he imagined he was doing. In the first week after his inauguration, Trump approved a Navy Seal raid on suspected positions of al Queda in the...

Ironies Of Minneapolis In 1944 the Minnesota Democratic Party united with the Farmer-Labor Party to form the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party of Minnesota, one of the most progressive state branches of the US Democratic Party.  In 1948 its mayor of Minneapolis, Hubert H. Humphrey introduced at the national convention the resolution supporting civil rights for African-Americans whose acceptance led to a walkout by Strom Thurmond and other Dixiecrats, with...

Coronavirus dashboard: updating the 52 Petri Dishes of democracy [Note: There is no significant economic data today (Dan here…May 13)  Thursday we’ll get initial claims, and on Friday retail sales and industrial production for April, both of which will be important] Here is the update through yesterday (May 12). I will restart giving the daily increase in infections if States that have “reopened” start to increase significantly again. The preliminary...

April deflation follows a typical recessionary pattern This morning’s consumer price index for April gives us our first indication of what the coronavirus recession has done to inflation. Overall consumer prices declined by -0.8% (blue), while consumer prices excluding energy (gas) declined -0.2% (red). Note that in 2015 when gas prices collapsed, prices otherwise continued to increase, showing the underlying strength of the economy. But in March and...

Reopening Isn’t Reopening—It’s Cutting Off Unemployment Donald Trump, cheering on his “warriors” who demand that states lift their lockdown and distancing orders (where they have them), would have you believe this is about bringing the economy back to life so ordinary people can get their jobs and normal lives back.  Elitist liberals who work from home and have country estates to retreat to don’t care, but “real” people do. The reality is different. ...

The Greater Good “If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.” — Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow Originally written in 2018 on the Save The Post Office blog and featured at Angry Bear in 2019, retired North Carolina Post Master Mark Jamison wrote on the issues facing USPS while in competition with Amazon, UPS, and FedX. The same issue has been brought to the forefront again with President Trump refusing to...

Arthur Dahlberg Pop-Up [embedded content]

bu Dale Coberly WHAT THE TRUSTEES REPORT REALLY MEANS REALLY “DOING THE MATH” [a few years ago the word “du jour” among journalists about SS was “it’s the math.” Of ourse none of them actually did the math.] [note: i use the tax rate for each the worker and the employer because this is what the worker “sees” and it is what the employer sees. It is also the legally correct division. The Trustees Report usually combines the separate tax rates into one...

Infections in US States by population density Since COVID-19 is a communicable disease, it should hardly be a surprise that the most densely populated States have the most cases per capita, and conversely the least densely States have the least cases.  But since that basic point is lost in a lot of the analysis, let’s take a look. Below are two charts consisting of the 12 most and least densely populated States, their respective population densities,...