My lovely wife shared this link with me on Facebook.  I got into a discussion in comments there with a right winger who suggested that $250,000 was a very reasonable estimate for median income in Boston. As it turns out, median household income in Boston is $51,914, close to the national average, and way below […]

Follow up to Afferent Input’s post. Ten states that are the highest in income tax non-payers are highlighted in (of all things) RED. It just gets better and better. Via my former governor.

One not particularly cute graph; no analysis, explanation, nor editorializing. GDPI is gross domestic private investment. NDGIC96 is Real Federal Nondefense Gross Investment. SLINVC96 is Real State & Local Government Gross Investment. Source page at FRED. Note that private investment runs at about 7 times the total of government investment at all levels. Make of […]

Part III – How to think about time series data. For reference:Part II  Federal Spending as a Fraction of GDP Part I  Federal Spending Growth Some commentors to the previous posts have rightly concluded that I consider spending under Obama in the context of historical trends.  In fact, if you don’t consider historical trends, you […]

A post like this really shouldn’t be necessary, but part of the right wing canard that Obama has been a profligate spender is based on spending as a percentage of GDP. It looks like this – Graph 1. Graph 1.  Fed Expenditures/GDP Sure enough, by the end of Clinton’s term the ratio had fallen from […]

Over at Plain Blog, an anonymous wing nut made this off-topic comment. Now, yes, Bill Clinton and his 2000 federal spending level of 18% of GDP doesn’t put him on the fringe, which makes it surprising that you lefties are celebrating him, even as you hysterically condemn anybody who resists the Left’s current massive spending […]

Krugman recently presented this graph, showing household debt as a percentage of GDP. and made this comment. Second, a dramatic rise in household debt, which many of us now believe lies at the heart of our continuing depression. There are those who seem to believe that if Krugman says it, it must be wrong.   Here […]

Do you think it’s the Fed? It’s not. The market determines short term interest rates. Really. The Federal Funds Rate, which is set by the Fed, FOLLOWS 3 month T-Bill rates.  It does not lead the economy.  Here are some looks.  First the whole data set, going back to 1954, presented in Graph 1. Federal […]

At Illusion of Prosperity, Stagflationary Mark posted this scatter-graph of quarterly GDP YoY growth and CPI data from Q1, 1948 through Q4, 2011.  Each point represents the differences from the medians of each data set for each of the variables, respectively.  This gives you a picture of time spent above and below what might be […]

Correlations and Slopes Over Time In Part 1, we looked at the ratio of consumption spending to net worth, and how it changed over time.  This time we’ll look at the correlation between net worth and consumption. Here is the big picture: personal consumption expenditures (FRED Series PCE) plotted against Net Worth (FRED series TNWBSHNO) […]