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

Keep information on Super Congress decisions open for our debate

A note from Firedoglake is relevent for the Super Committee today as a bid to keep the meetings less secret. Call or write committee chairs for more open meetings.: Senator Patty Murray: (202) 224-2621 Representative Jeb Hensarling: (202) 225-3484 Sample Script: Hello, my name is ________ and I am calling to ask that [SENATOR MURRAY […]

The Effect of Individual Income Tax Rates on the Economy, Part 5: 1968 – 1988

by Mike Kimel The Effect of Individual Income Tax Rates on the Economy, Part 5: 1968 – 1988This post is the fourth in a series that looks at the relationship between real economic growth and the top individual marginal tax rate. The first looked at the period from 1901 to 1928, the second from 1929 […]

Tax Havens in Reverse

Reuters provides a synopsis of a report by the OECD on tax-avoidance strategies by multinational corporations: 30/08/2011 – Due to the recent financial and economic crisis, global corporate losses have increased significantly. Numbers at stake are vast, with loss carry-forwards as high as 25% of GDP in some countries. Though most of these claims are […]

Puzzling Polls

I don’t understand my fellow US citizens. Many commenters will note that they told me that I didn’t since I don’t live in the USA, but I didn’t when I lived there. After the jump I try and fail to make sense of the latest NBC/WSJ poll. The nickel summary is that I thought that […]

Bleg – Yesterday’s FT (US PDF)

One advantage the electronic subscribers have over us print people when dealing with The World’s Worst Newspaper Website(TM) is that if they forget to download a holiday (read:not printed in the US) issue, they can access the phosphors without having to deal with The World’s Worst Newspaper Website. Anyone have a PDF of yesterday’s FT […]

The Cost of Labor

The standard model of Economic Development is Romer’s (1989, JPE 1990) adaptation* of Solow’s (1956, 1957) Model.  Basically, became Y = AKα(HL)(1-α) where the H stands for “human capital,” which multiplies the ability of labor. (Think high-skills labor—construction work, plumbing, teaching—where the worker continually “learns by doing” [op cit., Arrow, 1962]. The additional “human capital” […]

The Effect of Individual Income Tax Rates on the Economy, Part 4: 1950 – 1968

by Mike Kimel This post is the fourth in a series that looks at the relationship between real economic growth and the top individual marginal tax rate. The first looked at the period from 1901 to 1928, the second from 1929 to 1940, the third from 1940 to 1950. This week we look at 1950 […]

Updates to emlpoyment/population ratios

Bill McBride offers a look at the employment/population ratios by age at Calculated Risk, also offered at Mark Thoma’s Economist View: There will probably be some “bounce back” for both men and women (some of the recent decline is probably cyclical), but the long term trend for men is down. And several updates in graph […]

Employment report….

Spencer came home from vacation and found downed trees and lines and sporadic wifi connections he attempted in the neighborhood. His report will have its own timetable this week. I found Michael Konczal’s take at New Deal 2.0 useful. There was certainly a lot of reactions to the information. Payroll data came in this morning […]

Spanish consumers AND savers take a forced siesta

by Rebecca Wilder Recently we saw retail sales figures come out of Spain, Germany, France, and Italy. Across Europe, the seasonally-adjusted pattern of real retail sales is diverging. The chart above illustrates the real seasonally-adjusted and working-day-adjusted (for Europe) level of retail sales across key countries in Europe and the US (for comparison). The raw […]