Tag Archives: Featured Stories

Sandwichman in the FT Financial Times: “The minimum wage wars are heating up: A new study fails to prove its claim that Seattle wage floor hurts workers” by Martin Sandbu, at Free Lunch on FT Alphaville First, the numerical result struggles to pass an intuitive “smell test”. As the Angry Bear blog [cross posted at EconoSpeak!] points out, employment in Seattle was booming throughout the period: average wages increased by 18 per cent (!) in the time covered by...

One consequence of electing the popular vote loser is that the official winners act as if they have a mandate for the most extreme version of their policies. Thus, we have proposed legislation, the misleadingly titled Better Care Reconciliation Act, that will not only roll back Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid, but impose further large cuts on the program in addition. In total, the Medicaid cuts will come to $772 billion through 2026. As a result primarily...

CBPP has this pictorial analysis of the increased premiums resulting from the Senate version of the AHCA for a 60 year old at 350% FPL with an ACA Silver plan. “For a 60-year-old with income of 350 percent of the poverty level (about $42 ,000 today) facing the average premium on HealthCare.gov, out-of-pocket premiums would jump by an estimated $4,994. Premiums would rise by $ 2,022 for a 45-year-old at this income level, and fall by $75 for a 30-year-old....

Diane Ravitch points to the New York State legislature in her blog this week. NY is a Blue State having gone Dem in presidential elections; however, the state legislature is divided with the Dems controlling the Assembly and Repubs the Senate. What makes the New York state legislature interesting is the emergence of a Blue Dog Democrat segment of the State Assembly, which sides with the Senate Republicans on various issues. Blue Dogs (which I kind of like as...

Kansas Republicans abandon Brownback; raise taxes over his veto Remember Kansas’s great tax-cutting experiment under Governor Sam Brownback? (Me, sarcastic?) As always in Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore La-La Land, cutting taxes leads to economic nirvana. Except when it doesn’t, and it didn’t in Kansas. I recently wrote about the idiocy of Investor Business Daily‘s criticisms of California, and Paul Krugman carried the ball further, citing me and bringing in...

The Intelligent Economist lists Angry Bear among the top 100 economics sites in the US.

A Day in the Life of the jobs market, May 2017 Fifty years ago, when I was a little teenybopper,  his album came out and blew me away: Why bore you with this ancient Boomer reminiscence? Because the unemployment rate has only been lower than last month’s 4.3% in only six of the last 50 years, and only two of them in the last 46 years: Since February 1970, the only time the unemployment rate has been less than it is now is from 1999 into 2001. That’s not...

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...

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...

Following up on my post from two weeks ago, Immiseration Revisited, I built a spreadsheet replica of the marvelous Chapman diagram. In addition to lines on the page, the replica provides me with tables of numbers that I can add, subtract, multiply and divide in accordance with the conceptual logic of the diagram. The chart below shows the results of some of these calculations. The red curve graphs cumulative gross “output” and green curve subtracts the value...