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

Breakthrough in Kansas-Missouri Border War

by Kenneth Thomas Breakthrough in Kansas-Missouri Border War Via @goodjobsfirst, we learned Friday that Kansas Governor Sam Brownback had made a major response to Missouri’s proposed jobs truce in the Kansas City region. As regular readers may recall, studies have shown that more than $200 million has been spent moving jobs back and forth across […]

Pet Peeve: An America that Sees Only Itself

by Peter Dorman (from Econospeak) Pet Peeve: An America that Sees Only Itself This is a small but typical example: the New York Times today ran a story about frictions in the switch to embedded-chip credit cards.  The process has been bumpy, and retailers think the banks and payment processors have been exploiting them, while […]

Bear with me, AB readers. No pun intended. (OK, well sort of a pun intended.)

Regular AB readers know that from time to time I post links to web pages concerning animal welfare matters, including special-event donation request links, and so here’s another one, which I received in an email this afternoon.  And here’s the sort-0f pun intended.

Worstall’s Malignant Lump

In an op-ed at the New York Times yesterday, Nick Hanauer and Robert Reich made the following observation: In a cruel twist, the longer and harder we work for the same wage, the fewer jobs there are for others, the higher unemployment goes and the more we weaken our own bargaining power. That helps explain why […]

The best measure of labor market recoveries: March 2016 update

by New Deal democrat The best measure of labor market recoveries: March 2016 update In my opinion the best measure of how average Americans are doing in an economic expansion isn’t jobs, and it isn’t wages per hour.  Rather, it is real aggregate wage growth.  This is calculated as follows: average wages per hour for […]

Finance Committee acts / doesn’t act on important Tax Court, Social Security, and HHS Appointments

Linda is returning to blogging again.  Welcome back.   Dan by Linda Beale Finance Committee acts/doesn’t act on important Tax Court, Social Security, and HHS Appointments As the Senate Finance Committee continued work on its markup yesterday, it approved several important nominees for positions in the Social Security Administration and in the Tax Court, but […]

The new parsimony

– by New Deal democrat The new parsimony I came across the below graph showing that relationship of average household net worth with average debt vs. the personal savings rate from the NY Fed last week (h/t The Conversable Economist): The important point was that the relationship has changed since the Great Recession.  Even though […]