Tag Archives: Taxes/regulation

New home sales bombed in September Needless to say, this morning’s report on new home sales was another big miss in the housing sector. Not only were sales a new 12 month low, they were the lowest in nearly 2 years, and are off over -150,000 from their peak 10 months ago: Typically new home sales are down about -200,000 when a recession starts. That median prices have fallen in sync with sales, and not with their typical lag: makes me...

Jargon is a heck of a drug: If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success. The discourse of global warming/climate change is lousy with jargon. This rampant obfuscation gives science deniers rhetorical leverage and induces hallucinations about “Green New Deals” and “Environmental Kuznets Curves.” “Decoupling,” “rebound...

Tracking Trump’s tariffs: US vs. Canadian rail loads Let me start out by saying that there is an excellent case for the US imposing a VAT (“value added tax”) similar to those enacted by Canada and European countries in order to recapture the losses due to far lower wages in China and other developing countries. Additionally there is an excellent national security rationale for not entering into”free trade” agreements with authoritarian governments who...

Fiscal Dishonesty from Paul Ryan (Surprise!) We earlier noted that when our Treasury Secretary wrote this: Government receipts totaled $3,329 billion in FY 2018. This was $14 billion higher than in FY 2017, an increase of 0.4 percent…Outlays were $4,108 billion, $127 billion above those in FY 2017, a 3.2 percent increase. He was basically lying to us hoping the public would be too stupid to realize that when the price level rose by 2.5% during the same...

After instituting a $1.5 trillion tax cut and after signing off on a $675 billion Defense budget, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said yesterday, Tuesday, October 16, 2016; “The only way to lower the record-high federal deficit would be to cut entitlement programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.” More McConnell: “It’s disappointing but it’s not a Republican problem.” The deficit, grew 17 percent to $779 billion in fiscal year 2018....

Fiscal Dishonesty from CNBC and Our Treasury Secretary Is Jacob Pramuk on the White House payroll? US budget deficit expands to $779 billion in fiscal 2018 as spending surges. The federal budget deficit rose 17 percent in fiscal 2018, according to the Trump administration. Spending jumped, and revenue only increased slightly following the GOP tax cuts. The Trump administration has pushed for dramatic budget cuts at several agencies and supported massive...

Subdued September inflation means real hourly and aggregate wages grow Courtesy of subdued gas price increases this year vs. one year ago, overall consumer prices rose only 0.1% in September vs. 0.5% one year ago (and 0.3% over the last two months vs. 0.9% one year ago). As a result, YoY CPI growth is down to 2.3% vs. 2.9% several months ago, and that means that “real” wages increased, despite no movement in growth nominally YoY. With that background,...

Housing’s most difficult comparisons in years begin next Wednesday After a real quiet week for news, next week we get retail sales, industrial production, the JOLTS report, existing home sales … and housing permits and starts. The week after, real residential fixed investment will be reported as part of Q3 GDP.  Permits and residential fixed investments will have some of the most challenging comparisons in a long time. Here’s why. First, here’s a graph...

Tracking Trump’s trade wars: inventories and intermodal traffic Here’s something I thought I would start to track: looking for evidence of the effects of Trump’s trade wars on manufacturing and distribution. Producers and distributors aren’t simply going to sit back and wait to absorb new tariff expenses: we should expect them to engage in as much “front-running” as possible, importing the goods and commodities likely to be affected by the tariffs early,...

Is the taboo against raising wages beginning to break? It’s a *really* slow news week for economic data — just producer and consumer prices tomorrow and Thursday. Even JOLTS doesn’t come out until next week. But there was one little nugget of good news this morning: the NFIB, which represents small businesses, came out with their September report, and there was some good news about wages: more small businesses — 37% — said they *actually* raised wages in...