Tag Archives: Featured Stories

“Social Security and Medicare finances bolstered by growing economy,” (axios.com), Neil Irwin. Two different pieces of information going on here. The pie chart below shows were we were in 2021 for Medicare. I have not compared the pieces of information to see if they conflict. I do not have charts for Social Security, I can only imagine in my head the outcome. A million people died so the funds go to the living. The trustees of the programs...

October CPI report: total inflation increasing at 3.5% annual rate, core inflation minus shelter increasing at 2.8% annual rate in the past 4 months  – by New Deal democrat For a full year now I’ve been hammering the fact that the official CPI measure of housing inflation, “owners’ equivalent rent,” seriously lags actual house prices as measured by the most popular housing indexes. I said then, and I have reiterated almost every month since,...

I lived in Michigan for 27 years having moved from Madison Wisconsin. If I had my choice, we would have stayed in Madison. It was damn cold in the winter. We were still able to do things though. Michigan was not quite the same. It was never really home for us. Just too many things not right. The politics were deeply Republican in our county. The roads were in poor to fair condition, taxes were too low, and the county favored business. Voting...

As I write this it is still possible the Democrats will lose control of Congress, with all that entails, but the Democrats did outperform the fundamentals, and it is useful to think about why.  Here is my quick list of possible explanations: Increased partisanship and decreased cross-over voting (see here). Inflation may not be as much of an economic negative as a lot of commentary suggests; maybe unemployment matters more. Voters may be...

by Joseph Joyce Making Friends in the New Global Order U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen gave a talk at the Atlantic Council last April on the future role of cooperation in the global economy. In October Chrystia Freeland, Deputy Prime Minister of Canada and its Minister of Finance, gave an address at the Brookings Institution that presented a similar perspective on how the global economy must be reorganized to meet security demands. Their...

Medicare is almost $200 billion in gross drug spend: Who gets the blame? — 46brooklyn Research This is a complex issue as there are many moving parts to drug pricing and their costs. Perplexing in describing the drug spend issues would seem appropriate. I am not even sure if this long post will adequately define the issue of how drug prices are set. However, here is another article which I believe may break this down even more so. Later on...

Just finished “Africa, A Biography of a Continent”” by John Reader. I don’t recall how this book came into my possession. It may have been on my mom’s bookshelf when we stopped by after they moved to take whatever we wanted. Whatever its provenance, I had only read a little African history: “King Leopold’s Ghost” and a book on the Boer War are the only ones I can recall. I also read Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” which is a thinly veiled account of...

Two posts are at the bottom of this one. Just talking about on-purpose emission of exhaust by pickup trucks which have had the emissions control devices altered. They did this to blow black exhaust out of their exhaust. This report on Treehugger is an update on how well the world is doing. Simple terms, it ain’t. The goal with the implementation of conditional NDCs, plus additional net-zero commitments, was to achieve a 1.8°C rise. The United...

“A global house-price slump is coming,” The Economist, edited. I find this article to be interesting although I do not agree with much of it. Prices are an issue; but so are interest rates. Much of the costs of housing can also be from house manufacturing waste. I was watching my new home being built. The scrap is horrendous. The do-overs because of a lack of critical path are numerous. Quality is inspected into homes and not built into a home. I...

I bought a bottle of Belgian beer here in Rome. The guy behind the counter guessed I was from the USA (might have been my Joementum t-shirt) and said something which I now understand was “want a glass”. I said huh and he said “hai bisogna di un bichiere” so I said no. On my one block way home I saw 4 girls very cheerful about 6 to 8 years old. another with dad was arriving. They said that the had done “dolcetto/scherzeto” that is trick or treat....