Tag Archives: Uncategorized

You probably never heard of SCAAP, the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program.  But I expect it will be showing up in the news a lot pretty soon. This is what it does: The Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA), Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice, administers SCAAP, in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS). SCAAP provides federal payments to states and localities that incurred correctional officer salary costs for...

from L. Randall Wray Trump has put forward a number of proposals related to the theme of ending globalization – including renegotiating NAFTA and pulling out of the TPP – many of which were directed at China and other exporters. Like many American politicians, Trump has claimed that China is a “currency manipulator” and promises to pursue an investigation. He’s proposed large tariffs to be slapped on imports (variously suggested as 45% on Chinese exports to the US, 20% on all imports, and...

Recently I discussed a paper by David Autor, David Dorn, Gordon Hanson, Gary P. Pisano and Pian Shu. The paper noted that as competition from China increased, innovation by US firms, measured by patent output, decreased. I believe the result, but started to wonder… are patents a good measure of innovation? Do patents drive economic growth? I don’t know how to measure innovation, but I can look at the relationship between patents and economic growth. We being...

It was a dark and stormy global night economy and a spectre task was haunting facing Europe… A new supply-side agenda for the left The task facing Europe is to meet the challenge of the global economy while maintaining social cohesion in the face of real and perceived uncertainty. Rising employment and expanding job opportunities are the best guarantee of a cohesive society. The past two decades of neo-liberal laissez-faire are over. In its place, however,...

from Lars Syll In the realm of science it ought to be considered of little or no value to simply make claims about the model and lose sight of reality. There is a difference between having evidence for some hypothesis and having evidence for the hypothesis relevant for a given purpose. The difference is important because scientific methods tend to be good at addressing hypotheses of a certain kind and not others: scientific methods come with particular applications built into them … The...

from David Ruccio No one ever accused American conservatives of being particularly original. They started with a story about the failure of government programs and they stick with it, against all evidence. Originally, conservatives targeted African Americans, who (so the story goes, e.g., in the Moynihan Report) were mired in a culture of poverty and increasingly dependent on government hand-outs. In order for blacks to regain America’s founding virtues (so the story...

Back in 1934, the Bureau of Labor Statistics produced a fascinating and very readable book entitled History of Wages in the United States From Colonial Times to 1928 : Bulletin of the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, No. 604. There’s lots of cool stuff there, but it quickly becomes apparent that Colonial America was a whole other country than today’s America. I want to quote extensively from the beginning of the book. (Note – I’m not going to copy...

Hard to say the credit collapse is over. And as the causation is “bank loans create bank deposits” that component of the ‘money supply’ is decelerating as well: The seasonally adjusted rate of sales continues to work it’s way lower: From WardsAuto: Forecast: U.S. March Sales to Reach 17-Year High A WardsAuto forecast calls for U.S. automakers to deliver 1.61 million light vehicles in March, a 17-year high for the month. The forecasted daily sales rate of 59,776 over 27...

from James K. Galbraith and RWER no. 78 Could the economic program of President Donald Trump, if enacted, overcome secular stagnation? This essay addresses part of that question, focusing on the effects of a changing macroeconomic policy mix and thrust in the present US national and global context. A separate essay will address considerations on the supply side. The phrase “secular stagnation” is usually attributed to the early post-war Harvard economist Alvin Hansen, one of the first...