Tag Archives: Featured Stories

Here is something I have been working on for the last month.  As it happens, last week Kevin Drum posted some aspects of the same data. House prices have exceeded by a substantial margin median household income: But the monthly mortgage payments have not: This is because, while the prices of houses have increased, mortgage interest rates have decreased over the same period. So, saving for the down payment is considerably more difficult...

Trump’s Healthcare Executive Order Trump Signs Executive Order relaxing ACA health insurance rules. About a week or so ago, I had read this elsewhere, mentioned it, and was told there was no way this would happen. Similar to the three attempts to defund the ACA, Trump is doing what he says the Senate could not do and that is to take healthcare insurance away from the citizenry. More of Trump’s Executive Order down the page. Children’s Health Insurance...

By Steve Roth  (originally published at Evonomics) How Amazon’s Accounting Makes Rich People’s Income Invisible Image you’re Jeff Bezos, circa 1998. You’re building a company (Amazon) that stands to make you and your compatriots vastly rich. But looking forward, you see a problem: if your company makes profits, it will have to pay taxes on them. (At least nominally, in theory, 35%!) Then you and your investors will have to pay taxes on them again when...

On Richard Thaler Receiving The Nobel Prize This is a Sveriges Bank Prize in Economic Science in Memory of Alfred Nobel that I should approve of unequivocally, and I do approve of it. Dick Thaler has long been known to be on the list of likely recipients since at least when Daniel Kahneman shared it with Vernon Smith back in 2002, although I sort of thought the award just a few years ago for Robert Shiller would put Thaler’s off a bit. Nevertheless, I...

The Tax-Cut Framework Won’t Create Jobs and Digs the Inequality Ditch even Deeper Marcus Ryu, a self-described Silicon Valley entrepreneur who created, with others, a company now worth $5 billion on the New York Stock Exchange, argues in today’s Op-Ed section of the New York Times that “Tax Cuts Won’t Create Jobs“, NY Times (Oct. 9, 2017), at A23 (the title in the digital edition is different from the print title:  Why Corporate Tax Cuts Won’t Create...

Right Wing Propaganda Tank IPI Likes the Trump Tax-Cuts-for-the-Rich “framework” There’s no surprise here.  The Institute for Policy Innovation (IPI) is a right-wing “think” (i.e., propaganda) tank that has consistently argued for tax policies that favor multinational corporations and the wealthy.  So IPI has a posting on Sept 29 that is supportive of the so-called “tax reform framework” put out by the Trump administration. As an earlier post noted...

Worse Than The Usual Hypocrisy: Trump, Puerto Rico, And The Jones Act The Jones Act was passed 97 years ago to protect US shipping within the US from foreign-made ships.  I doubt I ever would have supported such an act, but at least back then there were plenty of US-made ships to fulfill the demand. Despite the Jones Act, the US shipping industry has collapsed in the last century so that the number of such ships is far below demand in normal...

Dan here…Angry Bear Steve Roth’s clear and thorough writing continues…please go to the original for more graphs…I could not include the largest in the Angry Bear format in its proper place.  Go straight to read more to view the whole post…. By Steve Roth (originally published at Evonomics) Insanely Concentrated Wealth Is Strangling Our Prosperity Remember Smaug the dragon, in The Hobbit? He hoarded up a vast pile of wealth, and then he just hung out in...

Dan here…Angry Bear Steve Roth’s clear and thorough writing continues…please go to the original for more graphs…I could not include the largest in the Angry Bear format in its proper place.  Go straight to read more to view the whole post…. By Steve Roth (originally published at Evonomics) Insanely Concentrated Wealth Is Strangling Our Prosperity Remember Smaug the dragon, in The Hobbit? He hoarded up a vast pile of wealth, and then he just hung out in...

A thought for Sunday: the most important issue in the 2016 election was . . . This is a post I’ve been meaning to write for several months. For a while after the election last year, there was a debate about whether the “economic anxiety” in the (white) working class was the most important factor vs. was it simply a matter of racism. The consensus has nearly settled on the narrative that racism was decisive, to the point where “economic anxiety” has...