Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

Explaining Class Warfare

  Last month one hundred and fourteen thousand unemployed moochers…suddenly yank the government teat out of their mouths, get off the couch for forty hours a week? Why?     I say follow the money; cause I found out, that right around the time those people got those jobs…they started getting paid!   And just […]

Income Mobility

Lifted from comments from Daniel Becker’s post here, reader PJR provides links to two good sources: Another data-driven study indicates income mobility is down at the same time that inequality is up, saying “Overall, the evidence indicates that over the 1969-to-2006 time span, family income mobility across the distribution decreased, families’ later-year incomes increasingly depended […]

Define Rich, Part III. What the tax tables of yore say.

 By Daniel Becker Randolph Duke: Money isn’t everything, Mortimer. Mortimer Duke: Oh, grow up. Randolph Duke: Mother always said you were greedy. Mortimer Duke: She meant it as a compliment. Trading Places 1983 A while ago (an understatement) I posted on the question of what is rich. The first dealt with what issues to consider […]

Monetary Policy. I’m not only not feeling it, I’m dehydrating because of it.

by Daniel Becker Continuing my prior post suggesting that what ever monetary policy has done, it has not reached that vast majority nor has it addressed what is the main issue, I viewed this chart by Mike Kimel and thought: Perfect!Then comes Ken Houghton linking to this article with it’s chart. What do they have […]

Random Notes 3 June 2011

Buce has been on fire recently, so I’ll probably have to do a post about why this post is so off-target, though his conclusion is correct (short version: he’s been misled). If I’m reading this morning’s SIFMA Brief correctly, Moody’s—whose rating skills Robert has discussed at length—(1) may downgrade US debt if we spend too […]

Monetary policy. I’m sorry, it’s just not doing it for me.

By Daniel Becker Stock market is up, Profits are up and banks are safe. So what? Unemployment is somewhere between going down and I can’t get no satisfaction. Housing values are still falling.  A new nationwide survey from real estate Web site Zillow.com says the value of U.S. homes fell 3% from January 1 to […]

More KISSing the income inequality

by Divorced one like Bush So, I’m listening to Saturday Night Fish Fry as I’m composing. It’s the blues, though the station is a jazz and folk station. Public broadcasting at it’s best! Maybe if the economy sinks enough, we’ll return to the big bands and swing. No more solo acts of Rockband. And, maybe […]

Let’s KISS the income inequality.

by Divorced one like Bush(Updated to correct my decimal point. I’m bad.) When I talk to others about why we’re in the mess we’re in from a position of income inequality using numbers like $1,025,000,000,000 per year from the 99% to the 1% does impress them, but as I posted a while ago it is […]

Inflation and interest groups in the Carter Years

Robert Waldmann Matthew Yglesias is very smart, but he is not omniscient. In particular he doesn’t remember things that happened before he was born and it appears that he has fallen for some Republican propaganda. He writes In the late 1970s, it just so happened to be the case that the structure of Great Society […]

The Race is on?

Will post-autistic economics review (who have, sadly imnvho, renamed themselves “real-world economic review) or The Economists’ [sic] Voice be the first to publish Robert Waldmann’s paper (a readable version of this blog post, which now also links to the paper)? Only Brad DeLong may know for certain. But you should read it now.