Tag Archives: Taxes/regulation

“There’s many a fly got stuck in there.” Who is Charlie Kirk? He is the 24-year old executive director and founder of Turning Point USA. Jane Meyer profiled the organization in the New Yorker in December: Based outside of Chicago, Turning Point’s aim is to foment a political revolution on America’s college campuses, in part by funneling money into student government elections across the country to elect right-leaning candidates. But it is secretive about...

Interest rates: no shift in the economic weather yet I wanted to make two comments about what has been happening recently with interest rates, a short term look and a long term look. Today let’s discuss the short term. Since September, long term Treasury interest rates have risen from roughly 2.1% to 2.8%. The two year Treasury yield has risen from roughly 1.3% to 2.1% — which means that for the first time in years, the 2 year Treasury is giving you...

Why Tax Cuts for Rich Dude Will Lead to Little Stimulus Over at Brad DeLong’s blog jonny bakho adds an interesting comment: How much stimulus did the GWBush tax cuts provide? They came during a recession followed by “jobless recovery” made somewhat better by the housing bubble, then burst big time in 2008. How different would the multiplier be if given to infrastructure repair and broadband extension, investments that create domestic jobs? In a global...

By  Steve Roth   (reposted from Evonomics) Consumption tax may not make sense You often hear calls out there — mostly from Right economists but also from some on the Left — for a consumption tax in the U.S. As presented, it’s a super-simple idea: tally your income, subtract your saving, and what’s left is your consumption. You pay taxes on that. We want to encourage thrifty saving and discourage profligate consumption, so what’s not to like? Lots. Before...

This is a post I’ve been meaning to put up all week (after all, this week was going to be very slow on data and news, right?). As the expansion gets more and more mature, the *relative* performance of certain measures of improvement become more interesting.  One of those is the comparison between U3 unemployment, and the broader U6 underemployment measure. While we only have about 25 years of data, so caution is warranted, generally speaking,...

(Dan here…Lifted from Robert’s Stochastic Thoughts) Drum goes easy on Goldberg It is progress that hack conservatives are bothsidesing now. Jonah Goldberg correctly notes that the problem isn’t just Trump but also broader extreme partizanship. He asserts that both parties are to blame. He seems to know he can’t defend this assertion and declines to try. I think he may be sincere — the extreme partisanship of Republicans means that in the Conservabubble...

With the market falling like it did over the past week it may prove valuable to look at the PE and some other economic reports.  In my PE model the market became overvalued in December and January.  The last observation is at the market close on Thursday, 8 February 2018. the previous two observation are the end of December and January values. Notice that the PE did not rise until December . As of November, 2017 the market PE was still below where it was...

Jobless claims make another record low One reason not to get excited about the last week’s stock market swoon is that it isn’t being confirmed by any other short term leading indicators.  Most significantly, jobless claims. The 4 week moving average of new jobless claims has fallen below 225,000. This is yet another 40 year record low. In fact, with the exception of six weeks in the early 1970s, it’s a new 50 year low. And adjusted for population...

A comment about the markets for the average reader This is a post aimed at the generally Progressive audience of this blog who followed us over from way back in our days at Daily Kos, rather than the financially sophisticated audience who have picked us up since (but of course everybody is welcome to read and appreciate!). Anyway, at times like this over 10 years ago Bonddad used to write posts like “A comment about the markets” for the DK audience,...

Why I’m not impressed by January’s 2.9% YoY wage growth I wanted to follow up on why I dissented Friday from the near-consensus take that workers finally got a nice raise, with many citing hikes in the minimum wage. As you may recall, the YoY% change in the average hourly earnings of all employees rose 2.9% as of January. That was the story in, for example, Marketwatch: Average hourly wages jumped 9 cents, or 0.3%, to $26.74, according to the Bureau of...