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

Subsidy Tracker Reaches Major Milestones

Subsidy Tracker, the free subsidy database created in 2010 by Good Jobs First, has reached major milestones in its coverage of state, local, and federal subsidies. This month’s enhancements to the database bring it to a once-unimaginable 500,000 individual incentive awards with a cumulative nominal subsidy value of $250 billion! That’s starting to add up […]

Refinancing is dead: a generation of Hard Times will continue until secularly real wages improve

New Deal Democrat writing from The Bonddad Blog On Monday I gave what I think is a reasonable roadmap to the next recession. I want to follow up on this a little. The post from nearly 10 years ago was entitled, Are Hard Times Near? The great decline in interest rates is ending.” The theory […]

Why did the Clinton campaign say earlier this month that Trump’s statement that he plans to partially default on the national debt could work? (And, yes, that, as the NYT mentions today, is what the Clinton campaign said.)

Debates have broken out in Mrs. Clinton’s Brooklyn headquarters over the best approach to take. Some advisers worry that by running against Mr. Trump as she would a traditional Republican candidate, Mrs. Clinton is actually making the reality­ television star appear more legitimate. This month, when Mr. Trump suggested he would reduce the national debt […]

Attractor State of Productive Capacity is Shifting

What is an attractor state? It is a state around which a dynamic system organizes itself. “Self-organization is the spontaneous often seemingly purposeful formation of spatial, temporal, spatiotemporal structures or functions in systems composed of few or many components. In physics, chemistry and biology self-organization occurs in open systems driven away from thermal equilibrium. The […]

You DID hear it here first. I picked Becerra for VP 15 months ago.

Clinton-Becerra 2016 Back then and even now it was and is ‘Xavier Who?’ But equally nobody thought Trump would even be running, still less making his campaign largely center on the Yuuuge Wall. And a lot of progressives are little leery of Julian Castro based on his mixed record as HUD Secretary. I think Congressman […]