Tag Archives: Featured Stories

How economists blew the analysis of the manufacturing jobs shock I came across this article yesterday, posted by – to his credit – Brad DeLong, whose argument it eviscerates. Entitled “The Epic MIstake about Manufacturing That’s Cost Americans Millions of Jobs,” it deserves widespread attention. So I am summarizing it here. But by all means go and read the entire piece. Just to give you the frame of reference, here is the historical graph of...

by Joseph Joyce The Changing Nature of FDI The OECD has published its data on flows of foreign direct investment (FDI) for the first half of 2019. They reveal how multinational firms are responding to the slowdown in global trade and the U.S.-Chinese tariffs. They may also reflect longer-term trends in FDI as multinationals reconfigure the scope of their activities. Overall global FDI flows fell by 20% in the first half of the year as compared to the...

“Trump’s Executive Order is Backdoor Privatization of Medicare,” Social Security Works, Nancy Altman, October 3, 2019 Thursday and I had to search around for someone who is an expert on Medicare Advantage Plans and Original Medicare. Nancy is one of those experts. Friday and Andrew Sprung has his commentary Trump’s Bid To Destroy Medicare up on xpostfactoid blog. Commercial Healthcare Insurance has been become more and more expensive over the years with...

First-ever binding end to a border war: Missouri-Kansas UPDATED (Dan here late….August 2 post) Kansas Governor Laura Kelly has just signed an executive order that prohibits state subsidies being used to move existing Missouri firms in four Missouri counties to three Kansas counties, which together make up the Kansas City metropolitan area. Unlike previous voluntary no-raiding deals, such as NY-NJ-CT, Council of Great Lakes Governors, and even Australia’s...

The House Democrats just released their drug pricing plan (summary) on the 19th. I read through it rather quickly and I found it to be interesting and having targets which could work. Rather than jump right into this, let’s talk about purchasing a bit and then what I believe would be better. In a purchasing negotiation there are two typical ways used to negotiate a price to your company. The first strategy is to tell a supplier you have done a market...

The incipient housing choke collar: July prices update Three months ago I first wrote about the concept of a “housing choke collar” constraining economic growth, to wit: The FHFA and Case-Shiller price indexes have only decelerated to a point where they roughly match median household income growth. This makes me wonder if prices for new homes will shoot back up again quickly as demand returns. If so, we could wind up in a “choke collar” situation...

Record Income Taxes? I should read more posts from Kevin Drum: The Yahoo News reporter comes close to explaining what happened by noting that there were more returns in 2018 than 2017. As you might guess, this happens every year as the US population increases. So let’s take a look at personal income tax receipts adjusted for inflation and population growth … In reality, income tax receipts were down 2.6 percent in 2018 compared to 2017. What this means,...

Cheerleading for Austerity Not content to follow a news strategy that maximizes Trump’s prospects for re-election, the New York Times leads today with a story that combines economic illiteracy and reactionary scaremongering in a preview of what we’re likely to see in the 2020 presidential race. “Budget Deficit Is Set to Surge Past $1 Trillion” screams the headline, and the article throws around a mix of dollar estimates and vague statements about...

“Tougher On Trade Than Trump”? This is how the NY Times has presented things day before yesterday, apparently lamenting that the Dem candidates are going to have a tough time presenting themselves as “tougher on trade than Trump.”  This somehow presumes that this is what they must do to win the election, and at least one has been making virtually this claim: good old Bernie.  A few have mumbled vaguely about Trump hurting farmers in the Midwest, but not...

It is standard analysis to see real and nominal imports as a share of GDP quoted to estimate the importance of imports in the economy. Currently that shows nominal imports are about  15% of GDP and real imports are some 18% of real GDP. But I suspect that this comparison understates the role of imports in the economy because services are some 45% of GDP but only about 16% of imports.  As my high school algebra teacher was fond of saying, you are adding...