Tag Archives: US/Global Economics

Devin Smioth at New Economic Perspective points us to ‘where does the money go?”: After President Trump signed the GOP tax plan into law, some of the bill’s corporate beneficiaries have offered workers minor bonuses. But NEP’s Bill Black says they’re keeping most of the money for themselves — and starting a new global race to the bottom for corporate taxes. You can view here with a transcript. [embedded content] ...

December jobs report: late cycle mediocre growth reasserts itself HEADLINES: +143,000 jobs added U3 unemployment rate unchanged at 4.1% U6 underemployment rate rose  +0.1% from 8.0% to 8.1% Here are the headlines on wages and the chronic heightened underemployment: Wages and participation rates Not in Labor Force, but Want a Job Now: rose +43,000 from 5.265 million to 5.308 million Part time for economic reasons: rose +64,000 from 4.851 million to 4.915...

Trump celebrates his (very expensive) tax cuts for himself and his rich golfing buddies Remember how Trump sold the Republicans’ $1.5 trillion-deficit-creating tax cut plan as a boon for the middle class that was going to create jobs and raise wages?  That was in September, when he told congressional lawmakers at the White House that “The rich will not be gaining at all with this plan.”  See Washington Examiner (Sept. 13, 2017). Let me repeat that: ...

By Steve Roth (originally published at Evonomics) Today’s mountains of wealth throttle the very engine of wealth creation itself. Insanely Concentrated Wealth Is Strangling Our Prosperity Remember Smaug the dragon, in The Hobbit? He hoarded up a vast pile of wealth, and then he just hung out in his cave, sitting on it (with occasional forays to further pillage and immolate the local populace). That’s what you should think of when you consider the...

Does Iran Have A “Poland Problem”? Maybe somewhat, but not as much as Poland does, with a “Poland problem” being where a well performing economy does not prevent political unhappiness.  Iran is experiencing massive demonstrations that are heavily driven by economic complaints, even though economic performance has improved since the adoption and approval of the JCPOA nuclear deal.  Prior to that, in the face of economic sanctions, the Iranian economy was...

This National Bureau of Economic research paper is behind a paywall, but the premise is up for discussion: This Paper challenges two widely held views: first that trade performance has been the primary reason for the declining share of manufacturing employment in the United States and other industrial economies, and second that recent productivity growth in manufacturing has actually been quite rapid but is not accurately measured. The paper shows that...

Via Robert Waldmann via  Paul Krugman: The central fact of U.S. political economy, the source of our exceptionalism, is that lower-income whites vote for politicians who redistribute income upward and weaken the safety net because they think the welfare state is for nonwhites  to Noah’s opinion :  A few people have noticed me tweeting a lot more about racial/cultural issues in the last two years, and less about the nuts and bolts of economics. Well, let...

By Steve Roth  (from 2016 October 2) In the millennias-long evolution of human societies and economic systems, we find ourselves today at a pass where three systems predominate, and fitfully cohabit: democracy, capitalism, and socialism. Most countries in the world operate with large doses of all three. Given that, it might seem odd that there are so many loud and prominent political voices who talk about eradicating one or more of the three. These...

I should title this: Yeah, it is just like 1929 you freak’n see, hear, and speak no inequality monkeys. I have this pile of income data sorted out from Saez’s work (the GDP is BEA). My thoughts regarding our economy is that income inequality (or equality) matters. It matters so much, that it is the all defining focus of government in a democracy. Every policy made should be judged against this goal of ever greater equality as we use the tool called...

Five graphs for 2017:final update At the beginning of the year, I identified 5 trends that bore particular watching, primarily as potentially setting the stage for a recession in 2018. Now that the year is ending, how did they turn out? #5 Gas Prices One potential pressure point on the economy was gas prices, which appear to have made a long- bottom in January of 2016. As they began to rise, consumer inflation has increased from non-existent to almost 3%....