Tag Archives: Hot Topics

Jobless claims continue their relentless climb  – by New Deal democrat Initial jobless claims rose 6,000 to 260,000 last week. More importantly, the 4 week average, which has been rising relentlessly, rose another 6,000 as well to 254,750, an 8 month high.  Continuing claims also rose 48,000 to 1,417,000, the highest since April: Initial claims have usually risen by 15% or more over its low, and turned higher YoY before a recession has...

Post written by Infidel753 as copied from his blog of the same name. The topic? Munchkin blue Kansas. Ding, dong….. Infidel753 Traditionally, Kansas has been as ruby-red as the slippers sported by its most iconic fictional inhabitant — but the state is looking a little more Munchkin-blue right now, with its voters dropping a house on an effort to facilitate banning abortion. At issue, ultimately, was a 2019 ruling by the state supreme...

Kip Sullivan sent this article to me today. Usually, I find them before he sends them to me. A quick introduction to the topic of this article. Billions of dollars are being spent on value-based ACO programs. They have done little to improve Americans’ health or lower health care costs. As the authors point out, of the 50+ ACOs examined, less than a handful cut costs. The ACO organizational cost saves were one percent or less. “Value-based...

Weekly Indicators for July 25 – 29 at Seeking Alpha  – by New Deal democrat My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. There have been some interesting counter-trend movements in the indicators. For example, interest rates on mortgages have declined by more than 1% since their peak one month ago. Gas prices have declined by about $0.80/gallon, or almost half of their increase that coincided with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine invasion...

Real income continued to fall in June, while consumers dug deeper to spend  – by New Deal democrat In June personal income rose 0.6% nominally, and nominal spending rose 1.1%. The personal consumption deflator, i.e., the relevant measure of inflation, clocked in at 1.0%, meaning real income fell -0.4%, while real personal spending rose 0.1%. I have been comparing both real personal income and spending with that with their level after early...

“Peabody’s Improbable History” Making a short trip in the Wayback Machine to October 2019.   We are going to a right-wing “AMPFests” at one of former president thump’s golf clubs, the National Doral. And we are looking for two trump conspirators having a discussion with one another. One of them has a wire recording device mistaking recoding their conversation. The conversation was captured via a microphone on Roger Stone’s lapel used by a...

Jim Hannan brought this issue up in AB comments section. Been too busy trying to get myself healthy again. Just unbelievable. Republicans want to cut out mandatory spending for veterans. This would be another time where politicians have used “veterans in need” to pursue their own political agenda. Vietnam vets saw similar issues. The Bush Administration was also shortchanging Iraq Veterans. And now veterans facing extreme health issues are being...

Coronavirus dashboard for July 27: likely at or past the BA.4&5 peak Let’s start with Biobot, since wastewater doesn’t lie. The bad news is, that it shows a nearly 50% increase between June 29 and July 20. The good news is, in the last week of that period, between July 13 and July 20, it only increased less than 4%, suggesting that the BA.5/July 4 superspreader celebration wave has peaked, at a level equivalent to 500,000 “real” cases (from a...

A collection of interesting reads, news, and articles from the last week. Healthcare “Fauci to Retire by End of Biden’s First Term” (medscape.com), “Biden’s chief medical officer (Fauci), who has also been director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, told Politico he is not planning to wait for COVID-19 to disappear before retiring.” “Three Key Strategies for Combatting Nurse Turnover” | MedPage Today,...

Just How Bad Is Biden’s Trip To Saudi Arabia?, Econospeak by Barkley Rosser  Yes, I posted on this awhile ago, but at that time it was a maybe. Now he is in the air on his way, although, of course, to Israel and the West Bank first, where I have no complaint or comment much. So, basically what I said earlier largely holds, that this is not a trip with much good likely to come out of it. Main “goods”?: affirmation of in-place cease-fire in...