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 […]
I overheard a conversation at a local restaurant on the impact of the US being dependent on China buying US bonds to finance federal debt. Usullay missing from such conversations is the % of money involved, whether that is a lot, and what effect it has on federal debt and trade (and some kind of […]
by Kenneth Thomas US wages trail 10 OECD countries, but with higher unemployment than 9 of them Contra Eric Cantor, Labor Day celebrates the importance of labor and the labor movement in American history. But the bluster of Cantor, where he celebrates the so-called job creators, does illustrate that organized labor has been in decline […]
by Run 75441 New Report on Getting the Best Care Both Matthew Yglesias at Slate and Sarah Kliff at WonkBlog and a host of other sites have posted some interesting results coming out of a recent study by the Institute of Medicine Best Care at Lower Cost: The Path to Continuously Learning Health Care in […]
From reader rjs comes this list of links in paragraph form on records being passed over time on Arctic sea ice and Greenland glaciers melting. New radar allows for a variety of measurements, one being a way to measure ice thickness in the Arctic. Edited lightly for readability: It has been an exciting week for […]
I have been trying to write a post on what could be achieved by Fed purchases of agency issued MBS. My only new point is that the MBS price that matters is the price paid to Fannie/Freddie/Ginnie not the price on the secondary market. That is, the price that matters is the price of new […]
In August I discussed the possibility that people were trying to use a bit of money to fiddle with the poll of polls. My hypothesis was that now that averages of polls are getting more attention than the well known polls taken alone (a reasonable change in emphasis) it is possible to make the average […]
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 […]
The August employment report shows the economy continuing with its very sluggish pace. Although the unemployment rate fell it was due more to a contracting labor force rather than expanding employment. The household survey showed a drop of some 119,000 while the payroll or headline data increased only 96,000 — private rose 103,000 while government […]