Tag Archives: Featured Stories

Why I’m worried about the decline in real wages This is a follow-up to my post yesterday concerning the decline in real average and aggregate wages. Why should the data from just one month cause me to warn that “This is Bad?” To show you, let’s decompose the data into CPI and nominal aggregate wages, shown in the below two graphs, the first of which covers the inflationary era of the 1960s and 1970s, and the second covers the disinflationary era since:...

Baumol Cost Disease and Relative Prices – Part 2 Many thanks to the Angrybear for reposting this as well as some excellent comments (save that absurd contention I’m a Luddite). If you check the comments over at Mark Perry’s place you will see that Paul Wynn made the same point I made and even linked to Timothy Lee: This became known as Baumol’s cost disease, and Baumol realized that it had implications far beyond the arts. It implies that in a world of...

National Health Spending at $3.5 Trillion in 2017, CMS Says: CMS is reporting healthcare spending was $3.5 trillion in 2017. National healthcare spending grew by 4.6%, up 3 tenths of 1% from 2016. The increase was blamed on increased spending for Medicare and higher premiums for healthcare insurance. The increase in healthcare premiums can be partially attributed to Republicans blocking the Risk Corridor – Reissuances Programs which eliminated competition...

“There’s many a fly got stuck in there.” Who is Charlie Kirk? He is the 24-year old executive director and founder of Turning Point USA. Jane Meyer profiled the organization in the New Yorker in December: Based outside of Chicago, Turning Point’s aim is to foment a political revolution on America’s college campuses, in part by funneling money into student government elections across the country to elect right-leaning candidates. But it is secretive about...

Distractions,  Distractions Wow!  We have a great controversy!  A squib of a memo by the House Intel Comm has completely devoured the media.  A constitutional crisis!  Egad!  In two weeks, or maybe two months, it will be nothing.  But for now, well, very very very serious. At a minimum it has distracted everybody from Trump’s gloriously successful State of the Union speech, which was so well received until this distraction that he thinks will bring about...

Other than a small number of fiscal conservatives who are ignored by their own party, it doesn’t seem like anyone really cares about the National Debt any more. That’s a relatively new thing. Doing something about the Debt was one of the platforms of the GW Bush campaign in 2000. Of course, what he actually did to the Debt was the precisely the opposite of what he told us he was going to do. Then came Obama, whose economic policies – certainly with...

What is the GOP goal? A return to the “gilded age” (or worse) When right-wing Roy Moore said that the time when America was great was during slavery, he revealed something key to the current GOP members of Congress and state legislatures–their primary goal is to return to a time when owners of property held all the keys to the kingdom and workers were just serfs expected to do as told and whose lives didn’t really matter much to the boss capitalists....

Corporatizatizing The All-Administrative University One of the few good things that appears to have happened in the conference committee on the generally awful impending GOP tax bill is that the hits students were going to take have been eliminated.  However, even without that additional burden, college students face costs that are far higher than any other nation and have been rising above inflation rates for decades.  While` students in Denmark...

(Dan here…lifted from an e-mail) I’m not registered with seeking alpha so I cannot read the whole article (I had sent), but what I read looks a lot like what I’ve written over the years.  Here are some statements which, working off memory, I have written posts about and which I think are supported by US macroeconomic data from the last 100 years: 1.  A tax cut generally gooses the economy in the short run (one – two years). That story is a Republican...

by Joseph Joyce Venezuela and the Next Debt Crisis The markets for the bonds of emerging markets have been rattled by developments in Venezuela. On November 13,Standard & Poor’s declared Venezuela to be in default after that country missed interest payments of $200 million on two government bonds. Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro had pledged to restructure and refinance his country’s $60 billion debt, but there were no concrete proposals offered at...