When Jackasses reign. John Kerry answers a Congressman. “Kerry delivered his rebuke of the GOP’s inaction on the environment to Rep. James Comer (R-K.Y.). Comer questioned whether there was a reasonable way for the U.S. to afford the ideas entailed in the resolution, which was introduced by Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) in February. […]

Does Cochrane Really Understand the Latest on Minimum Wages? John Cochrane thinks we liberals who think higher minimum wages can do some good by offsetting monopsony power fail to grasp labor economics. He is citing some work by Jeffrey Clemens, Lisa B. Kahn, and Jonathan Meer. Alas his blog post screwed up the link to this […]

France’s Fiscal Dilemma Solved I was struck by this morning’s headline in the New York Times: No doubt this was intended as irony, but that itself is ironic, since the “unrealistic” attitude it sums up is actually a good starting point for policy.  France has one of the world’s better welfare states, and it should be preserved […]

Just this morning I read this article by The Guardian; Doctor Who Was Paid by Purdue to Push Opioids to Testify Against Drugmaker “In a newly released statement to an Ohio court hearing a combined lawsuit of more than 1,600 cases, Doctor Portenoy accuses drugmakers of underplaying the dangers of opioids and of pushing them […]

I told you so: the March employment report showed a slowdown in the leading sectors For the past few months, I have been forecasting a jobs slowdown. That has been based in part on the natural progression of a downturn in long leading indicators, then short leading indicators, and finally to coincident indicators of which […]

Based on my wage equation, last January I warned to expect a sharp acceleration in wage growth in 2018.  Now that wage growth has risen       from 2.4% in 2017 to 3.4% in 2018, the same economic variables imply that wage growth may be flattening out.  If wage growth remains near    current […]

In writing about the increase in Opioid abuse since 1980 and looking around for additional information for Robert Waldmann, I ran across this information as developed by the US Senate Joint Economic Committee. The committee is majority led by Republicans with Democrats being a part. The committee had added additional yearly data pre-1980, when the […]

by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for April 1 – 5 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha.  Interest rates ticked up this week, which brought the readings on some interest rate indicators back down. As usual, clicking over and reading helps reward me with a little $$$ for my efforts.

On my personal blog, I mentioned that Tom Nichols is absolutely unwilling to discuss the run up to the US/UK?Australian invasion of Iraq. He is careless about facts and expresses contempt for even considering the official conclusions drawn by Hans Blix. He will not face evidence and has total contempt for expertise. He asked me […]