As I explained in a conversation, what was done most recently by some wonderfully-over-funded people in an effort to get their children into a Tier one school certainly did not have to happen in the manner it did. They could have just approached school authorities and with a “Mellon’s” (Back to School’s – Rodney Dangerfield) […]

Now that Andrew Yang has made it into the first debate by meeting the fundraising threshold, and being on Morning Joe this morning,  it is time to post this interview of him via Freakonomics. I was impressed by his thought approach.  He is the first person who is talking about the economy as a ecosystem […]

I just had an unusual experience. I was convinced by an op-ed. One third of the way through “Elizabeth Warren Actually Wants to Fix Capitalism” by David Leonhardt, I was planning to contest one of Leonhard’s assertions. Now I am convinced. The column praises Elizabeth Warren. Leonhardt (like his colleague Paul Krugman) is careful to […]

Preventing Presidential autocracy: thoughts on reining in Executive power Matt Yglesias posted a jarring tweet this past week when he wrote: He elaborated by linking to a long-form article he wrote four years ago, explaining his position, where in relevant part, he wrote: America’s constitutional democracy is going to collapse. Some day … there is going to be a […]

Lawrence Ferlinghetti Turns 100 Years Old On the forthcoming March 24. This last of the Beat Poets, who founded and still owns both the City Lights bookstore and the associated City Lights press, which legally overcame an effort in 1956 to prevent him from publishing Allen Ginsberg’s poem, _Howl_, he is not only alive and […]

By Steve Roth (reposted from Evonomics) The Real Reason Stock Buybacks Are a Problem  Buybacks are a massive tax dodge for shareholders Bernie Sanders and Chuck Schumer’s New York Times op-ed, “Limit Corporate Stock Buybacks,” has thrown internet gasoline on the buyback debate. The left is waving the flag, and the right is trying to tear it down. […]

Leading scenes from the February jobs report Let me catch up with some details from last Friday’s employment report. As a preliminary matter, the overwhelming take was that the poor +20,000 gain was “nothing to see here, just an outlier.” The problem with that take is that, for all of 2018, the average monthly gain […]

The Lordstown Effect Late last week, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) announced that he will not run for president in 2020, declaring that he would prefer to stay in the Senate to criticize President Trump and support whomever the Dems nominate against Trump. He had been highly praised by various commentators, including Chris Matthews, and even […]

by New Deal democrat More evidence for a Q4 “Recession Watch” About a month ago, based on those Q4 2018 reports that had not been delayed by the government shutdown, plus workarounds for those that were missing, I went of “Recession Watch” for Q4 of this year. Now all of the missing pieces have been […]

Real wage growth continued to improve in February    Now that we have February’s CPI (up +0.2%), let’s update nominal and real wage growth. First, here is a graph of nominal wage growth YoY vs. consumer inflation YoY since the beginning of this expansion almost 10 years ago: First of all, why do I bother […]