Tag Archives: Taxes/regulation

Emoluments As Grounds For Impeachment I have said this before, but am saying it again.  The clearest grounds for impeaching Donald Trump are not his obstruction of justice on which so much attention is being focused, but in my view his blatant and unequivocal acceptance of emoluments from foreign governments, with this most clearly evident at his hotel in Washington, with these emoluments the basis of lawsuits by the governments of Maryland and D.C....

Yes, Virginia, the government shutdown really did cause a mini-recession For the past several months, I have been pounding on the idea that the government shutdown, during which 800,000 jobholders were temporarily laid off without pay, had a much bigger impact on the economy than was originally thought. This morning we get the following graph from Bank of America Merrill Lynch, which speaks for itself:  One of the most important insights from...

San Francisco Fed: ease of finding a new job is driving improved labor force participation This is a surprising result that is worth noting: the San Francisco Fed found that the increase in prime age labor force participation in the past five years has not been due to new people being drawn into the labor force, but rather by a very large decrease in people leaving it: [Note: keep in mind that prior to the early 1990s, both inflows and outflows are...

Dan here…the United States Library of Congress will be archiving and collecting material from Angry Bear. The overall digital archiving project began in ernest since 2013.   Abbie Grotke,  Lead Librarian Web Archiving Team, affirmed the process.  Below are excerpts from the letter of request and the Library website. The United States Library of Congress has selected your website for inclusion in the historic collection of Internet materials related to...

by Dale Coberly KOTLICOFF ON THE HILL with Social Security Larry Kotlikoff wrote an editorial that appeared May 14 in “The Hill:”  https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/443465-social-security-just-ran-a-9-trillion-deficit-and-nobody-noticed He cried, “Wolf! Wolf! Social Security ran a 9 Trillion Dollar Deficit last year and nobody noticed!” He went on to explain this was the increase in the “infinite horizon Present Value of the Unfunded Deficit” from...

Justice Stevens Shoots At Gun Decision Former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, now 99 years old, has written a book, The Making of a Justice: My First 94 Years. Apparently he considers the  District of Columbia versus Heller decision to be the worst of all those that was made during his time on the Supreme Court, that one on  a 5-4 vote.  That decision upended the interpretations of the Second Amendment that had been in place since the amendment...

Two Recent Studies, Children of Incarcerated Parents and the Long Run Effects of Student Debt Amid the blooming flowers of May, each year sees the arrival of the Papers and Proceedings volume of the American Economic Review, containing short and sometimes punchy gleanings from the previous ASSA meetings.  Here are two abstracts of interest.  I haven’t gone through the papers themselves, so I can’t vouch for their methodologies, but the results they...

Why I’m Not Going to Properly Review “The People’s Republic of Wal-Mart” I’ve been thinking about alternatives to capitalism for a long time now.  I’ve taught several courses on the topic and plan eventually to write up what I think I’ve learned, so naturally I was intrigued by the new book, The People’s Republic of Wal-Mart: How the World’s Biggest Corporations Are Laying the Foundation for Socialism (PRW) by Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski.  I...

Gas prices fail to ignite overall inflation in April, but real wages flat so far for 2019 The consumer price index rose +0.3% in April, just as in March mainly as a result of a big monthly increase in gas prices. This is actually a surprisingly small increase because, as I pointed out last month, almost every time gas prices have increased by as much as they did — up 9% in March and 11% for April — consumer prices as a whole have gone up at least +0.4%....

The Psilocybin Referendum In Denver This is one of the last things I was expecting to see happen; that a referendum in Denver would effectively decriminalize magic mushrooms or more specifically the main constituent component of them, the psychedelic drug, psilocybin.  But this has happened in the Mile High City, if by a narrow margin.  I largely welcome this.  After all, it has always been sort of ridiculous to arrest someone for owning a naturally...