Steve Hutkins at Save The Post Office, October 26, 2020 In response to several inquiries from members of Congress, the Office of Inspector General has issued a report on “Operational Changes to Mail Delivery.” The report discusses the Postal Service’s plan to eliminate 64 million work hours — the equivalent of 33,000 jobs — by […]
Personal income and spending both surprisingly continued to increase in September, plus a note on GDP Yesterday the first estimate of Q3 GDP was reported. Since this report includes 2 long leading indicators, it gives us insight into what the economy might be like in the 2nd half of next year. I have a […]
Figures 1 & 2
Coronavirus dashboard for October 27: The EU is now worse than the US Total US confirmed infections: 8,777,432* Average US infections last 7 days: 71,833 (new record high) Total US deaths: 226,695 Average US deaths last 7 days: 806 (vs. recent low of 689 11 days ago) *I suspect the real number is about 15,000,000, […]
The Philosophy That Makes Amy Coney Barrett So Dangerous, NYT, Erwin Chemerinsky, October 2020, Opinion Piece If I did not know this man personally, I would have never looked to him for help and also advice from time to time. It was only through a friend I wrote with at the old Slate site, I had […]
Abolish The Office Of The Director Of National Intelligence (ODNI) A sign that this entity should be abolished, and I mean really gone, done in, not with its parts redistributed to other entities, is that it is an entity defined by its director, not itself. In preparing to write this post I checked on it, […]
An Irony About Interest Rates And Income Distribution It has long been a truism of economics that high-interest rates were favored by wealthy capitalist lenders against poor borrowers, with such a view lying behind the populist demands of the late 19th century. We are used to applauding Keynes’s forecast of the “euthanasia of the rentiers.” […]
Or one would think so, given people resist wearing a mask, social distancing and they want to party like its 1999. Song written in 1982 . . . “Don’t worry, I won’t hurt you. I only want you to have some fun,” Covid. Melissa Jeltsen, Huffpost; “The U.S. has entered an ominous new surge of the coronavirus pandemic, […]
Matthew Yglesias has a good discussion of why the poll-based models that give Biden a high probability of winning are probably right, despite the well-known polling errors in 2016. Nonetheless, it seems reasonable to believe that the poll-based models (538, The Economist) are overstating Biden’s chances, for several reasons. Turnout this year will be unusually […]