When I was a newbie Social Security commenter and then blogger back in the 1999-2004 era there was a day I only half faceticiously called “The Bestest Day of the Year at Webb House!”. Yes it was Social Security Report Release Day which came out like literal clockwork on March 31st, so much so that […]
Over at Tax Research UK, Richard Murphy offers a simple test to distinguish between tax planning and tax avoidance. As he told a journalist, “That is easy. It’s getting legal opinion.” With tax planning, Murphy says, you decrease your tax risk. “There are obvious examples: paying money into a pension, for example, does not create […]
This was an answer in the local Weekly Reader to a couple of others who insisted VA healthcare should be disassembled and handed over to the private sector. I guess I could have said “nuts; I did say “nonsense.” “All right, they’re on our left, they’re on our right, they’re in front of us, they’re […]
I wrote back on January 28, 2014… “This is a character defining moment in capitalism, when the majority are not aware that the end of a business cycle is forming. There is asymmetric information, if you will. A few understand it. The majority do not. So what should be a time of seeking a sustainable […]
Sorry for my absence. This is mainly a link to this post by Emily Badger at the still excellent wonkblog. just a quote a 10 percentage point increase in Medicaid eligibility among children in a state translated into a 5.2 percent decline in high school dropouts (among all students), a 1.1 percent increase in college […]
How people use economic terms mainly as a political stance comes in all levels of expertise and income levels. And how to combine advocacy and justice, whether from the Koch brothers or Walmart and McDonald’s workers, is often blurred and has only soft edges based on personal context and daily exposure to whatever one thinks […]
In China, imports have fallen quite a bit recently. The drop in imports was not just in commodities like copper and iron ore, but in non-commodities too. The implication is that their domestic demand is weak. From a WSJ article, Economists React: China’s Sluggish Imports Raise Concerns. I focus on the comment by one economist […]
Via newsletter from rjs: We’ll include Bill McBride’s graph from his coverage of this report below because it best shows how our trade deficit suddenly spiked over the past 5 months after 2 years of gradual improvement…reading from the top $0 line down, the black graph line tracks our deficit in petroleum trade only in […]
Also via the New York Times comes an article on NSA versus the internet giants like Google. I haven’t a clue (other than skepticism and ‘how does that work?’) as to what it actually means. Just down the road from Google’s main campus here, engineers for the company are accelerating what has become the newest […]