Tbe Italian parliament has elected Sergio Mattarella president of the republic. For US readers, the Italian President is like the constitutional monarch of the parliamentary republic. Actual controversial decisions are made by the prime minister (now Matteo Renzi). The president has great power in theory on the understanding that it is used only of the […]
Disappointingly, the BEA flash estimate is that US GDP grew at an annualized rate of only 2.6% from the third to the fourth quarter of 2014 after having grown at a 5 % annualized rate from the second to the third. This is well within the ordinary range of changes of growth rates without a […]
This article via Yahoo news caught my attention: Five years into recovery, Dow Companies squeeze workers as investors thrive I think this picture spells it out rather well. “As the chart shows, the 30 huge companies that comprise the Dow Jones Industrial Average have barely nudged their employee ranks higher…” But this is even […]
by Joseph Joyce Inequalities, National and Global The publication of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century brought attention to an issue that has been slowly seeping into public discourse. President Obama’s State of the Union address made it clear that we will not need to wait until the 2016 Presidential campaign to hear proposals […]
We had about 33 inches of snow with the blizzard Juno. Luckily it was a light and fluffy snow, so there was little damage for electric lines and such. (The storm was a reminder to check ocean temperatures and effects on weather.)
US technology giant Apple has reported the biggest quarterly profit ever made by a public company. Apple reported a net profit of $18bn (£11.8bn) in its fiscal first quarter, which tops the $15.9bn made by ExxonMobil in the second quarter of 2012, according to Standard and Poor’s Wowww in one quarter Apple made 3/14ths of […]
Noah Smith has replied to my recent post criticizing his use of median household income to measure middle class living standards. He raises some interesting questions, but some of them still leave me scratching my head. Smith writes: I don’t understand the idea that “households have had to” compensate for lower weekly wages (also the […]
CBO Budget and Economic Outlook: 2015 to 2025 Document link for Robert’s post. Lots of numbers here, including a new Jan 2015 Baseline for Social Security Just started poking at the numbers but it seems that CBO has revised projected revenue for SocSec down going forward. Not by a lot but perhaps enough to make […]
The CBO lowered its forecast of the cost of the Affordable Care Act by 20% h.t. Richard Mayhew and @StevenTDennis Here is the CBO report (pdf warning) I clip and past a dramatic graph They also estimate that it has caused 12 million more people to have insurance. This is the net increase subtracting cancelled […]