Tag Archives: Taxes/regulation

The consumer is alright One of my big themes this year is that low gas prices can hide a multitude of economic sins. This morning’s data on personal income and spending confirms that the consumer side of the economic ledger is doing OK. Nominal personal income rose +0.4%, and nominal personal spending rose +0.5%. After adjusting for inflation, the numbers are +0.3% and +0.2%, respectively. As a result, the positive trends for both continue: On a YoY...

Initial jobless claims: positive this week, but close to crossing two thresholds for concern I have started to monitor initial jobless claims to see if there are any signs of stress. My two thresholds are: 1. If the four week average on claims is more than 10% above its expansion low. 2. If the YoY% change in the monthly average turns higher. Here’s this week’s update. The four week average is 9.8% above its recent low: On a weekly basis, YoY the...

Ali Velshi Interviews Arthur Laffer Today I endured listening to Arthur Laffer lie serially to Ali Velshi today. Skip the first 36 minutes of this Youtube as the interview begins there. Never mind the praise for Laffer’s cheerleading for Trump. Laffer actually claimed that the FED’s low interest rates after the Great Recession began was the cause of the Great Recession. OK! But then he pivots and advocates we should have low interest rates now that Trump...

It is doubtful Trump reads much beyond his own signature on Executive Orders and Twitter commentary. Someone is attempting to align him with current thinking creating a persona of his being a thoughtful and reasoning president as opposed to . . . ? In “Again, Healthcare Cost Drivers Pharma, Doctors, and Hospitals ,” I had posted stats from a 2016 JAMA paper covering the period from 1996 to 2013. Healthcare costs had increased $1 trillion of which 50%...

Via Naked Capitalism: Place based economic conditions and the geography of the opioid overdose crisis By Shannon Monnat, Associate Professor, Syracuse University. Originally published at the Institute for New Economic Thinking website Over 400,000 people in the U.S. have died from opioid overdoses since 2000. However, there is widespread geographic variation in fatal opioid overdose rates, and the contributions of prescription opioids, heroin, and...

(Dan here….)  Via the New York Times comes an article on the Social Security shortfall.  No explanations given for what the shortfall context is, and not till the end was a fix suggested.  In comments calling SS a ponzi scheme (with no explanation) was common, or with the fix mostly was about lifting the cap.  Only one commenter referred readers to a Bruce Bartlett article from 2013 on the matter, From an e-mail by Dale Coberly Forgive me,  I have...

I’ve been on the beat of income inequality since I started blogging here.  My theory: We changed the way we make money from one of making it from producing (polishing rocks into tools) to one of making money from money.  When you can make money from moving money, you don’t need to compete.  Just buy back your stock, just collect rents, just get your tax cuts. The World Bank has a new report out on Inequality 2018.   I want to direct you to a chart that...

Robert J. Samuelson Goes Whole Hog Against Dems On Social Programs I want to follow Dean Baker in dumping on the Robert J. Samuelson Monday, 9/11/19 WaPo column on “The Democrats’ fairy-tale campaigns.”  He may be right that lots of proposals have been put forward with no clear accounting of how much all of them will cost, but RJS also fails to recognize some might save money, such as a properly structured universal health care program that might move...

Scenes from the May employment report: expect more lackluster reports, and layoffs in manufacturing Three months ago when the poor February jobs report came out, I was just about the only commentator who saw it as a harbinger rather than an outlier. On Friday the naysayers got silenced.Let’s see how the more leading aspects of the employment report played out, with an eye towards the near future. To cut to the chase, expect more lackluster total payroll...

For party voting preference, which is more important, age or education? Looks like we have an answer For all the slicing and dicing that has been done in voting metrics for 2016 and 2018, one quandary has stood out. We know that higher educational attainment has strongly correlated with voting for Democrats, and we also know that there was a stark age difference in votes between Clinton and Trump in 2016: a majority of voters younger than 45 voted for...