by Linda Beale Inequality: Obama’s Speech, Detroit’s Bankruptcy, Taxes Was Obama’s speech on inequality really what Michael Lind claims in “The Day the Right Lost the Economic Argument” Salon.com (July 25, 2013)? The right, both here and internationally, has been pushing for austerity for most while those at the top reap unparalleled rewards from upward-moving […]
To find out if productivity is really demand constrained, let’s look to see what happens when productivity is up against the effective demand limit. We will find that productivity stops and sits for a number of years. First we get the data and build the model. The data will come from this graph at FRED. […]
Lifted from Robert’s Stochastic Thoughts: Minesweeper in the Washington Post. “It’s like Minesweeper,” former Wyden staffer Jennifer Hoelzer told The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein in June, referring to the computer game in which players slowly probe unknown territory, looking for bombs. “You just have to ask questions to try to get the outlines of what they’re not […]
Wired points to lawsuits fizzling so far, but also more secrecy and claims it is off limits to courts. The Obama administration for the first time responded to a Spygate lawsuit, telling a federal judge the wholesale vacuuming up of all phone-call metadata in the United States is in the “public interest,” does not breach […]
by Linda beale Proposals for Cutting the IRS Budget As the budget battles loom again in our dysfunctional Congress, one of the targets of the right is, not unexpectedly, funding for the IRS. Sequestration is already hampering the IRS’s ability to perform its functions. See $6 collected for every $1. But the right wants to […]
by Linda Beale Senators promised 50 years of secrecy on their tax reform proposals There continues to be more blather about the need for “tax reform, and buddies GOP Dave Camp and skin-deep Dem Max Baucus seem to be intent on accomplishing something “big”. And that’s what’s worrying me. The Republicans have been arguing that […]
by Rebecca Wilder The trend in US corporate profits is what you think it is In my research for an article about the cross section of national income, I ran across this piece in Forbes by Tim Worstall. In this article, he uses proprietary Bloomberg and WSJ data for 2012 corporate offshore cash holdings to assess […]
I was watching a video from the World Economic Forum 2013 in Davos, Switzerland. The video is a panel discussion on the subject, “No growth, easy money, the new normal”. The World Economic Forum 2013 took place in January 2013. It is basically a discussion of monetary policy in dealing with the crisis. In the […]
I see this logical error so constantly, almost every day, that I feel the need to reiterate. Personal saving, virtuous and useful as it is for individuals, does not increase investment. This is what I call the “lump of money” fallacy (a.k.a. the loanable funds model). Ask yourself: If you transfer $10K from your bank […]