WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) Andy Borowitz: “Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s facial expression during the State of the Union address came under continued attack from Republicans on Thursday, with the former House Speaker John Boehner joining the chorus of disapproval. ‘When I saw her with that pained expression on her face, I couldn’t believe my eyes,’ Boehner […]
by New Deal democrat Q4 Senior Loan Officer Survey says … The Senior Loan Officer Survey is one of my list of long leading indicators. The Q4 report came out yesterday. The news wasn’t good. This post is up at Seeking Alpha. Meanwhile, since the dates for publication of neither housing permits nor Q4 GDP were […]
How To Go After The US Wealthy Reagan Style Ah yes, this is going to be another one of those ironic posts about what a big leftist liberal Ronald Reagan was compared to the current GOP gang in charge of so many of our policies, especially our tax policies. Certainly, the image of Reagan is […]
UPDATE: Foxconn now says that it will indeed still build a factory, citing a conversation between CEO Terry Gou and Trump (h/t commenter Joel at Angry Bear). This is certainly clear as mud. As others have pointed out, several promised investments from Foxconn have failed to materialize at anywhere near the scale promised, including in Brazil, Pennsylvania, Indonesia, Vietnam, […]
Leading scenes from the employment report not so positive I seem to have been the only person to pick up on the weakness in the underlying leading aspects of last Friday’s jobs report. While the number of job gains was great, and that average wages for non-managerial workers had their second best showing, at 3.4%, […]
If you want to understand why Mark Thoma’s 12-year daily-and-then-some blogging effort has become intermittent, consider that President Shit-for-Brains has made his nomination for the person to ru(i)n the World Bank. David Malpass. This David Malpass. The best part of the nomination so far? This Twitter feed from Charles Kenny. Brad DeLong concurs. And I’m […]
The End Of The End Of The Cold War It is a sign of how wacko things have gotten that the truly most important event of the past week has simply been buried in the news by all the huffing and puffing over Trump’s shutdown ending and these revelations about VA Governor Northam. This would […]
Reduction in Representation as the remedy for voter suppression This is the second take prompted by my reading of David W. Blight‘s biography of Frederick Douglass. In the “nothing is every really new” department, voter suppression was very much on the mind of Douglass and other radical Republicans during the Civil War and its immediate […]
Frederick Douglass, Andrew Johnson, and the Copperhead GOP I am currently reading David W. Blight’s biography of Frederick Douglass, the 19th century orator and champion of black equality. Today I wanted to briefly write on several timely topics inspired by that tome. Douglass was biracial, or in the parlance of the day, a mulatto. His […]
January jobs report: a tale of two almost diametrically opposed components HEADLINES: +304,000 jobs added U3 unemployment rate rose 0.1% from 3.9% to 4.0% U6 underemployment rate rose 0.5% from 7.6% to 8.1% Here are the headlines on wages and the broader measures of underemployment: Wages and participation rates Not in Labor Force, but Want […]