by New Deal democrat Personal spending and new home sales: restrain your enthusiasm!  We got the last two significant data points of the year this morning: personal spending and new home sales.  Both rose significantly. BUT there are big drawbacks to each. First of all, take a look at the personal savings rate: It just […]

by Diane Coyle,  Professor of Economics at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom, GDP: Falling Short  (from IMF website here ) Gross domestic product, or GDP, has been used to measure growth since the Second World War when economies were all about mass production and manufacturing. In this podcast, economist Diane Coyle, says […]

by Mike Kimel   (from 2012) Tax Rates v. Real GDP Growth Rates, a Scatter Plot   This post was submitted by Kaleberg. In this post, I will look at the relationship between top marginal income tax rates and real GDP growth using a scatter plot. I am inordinately fond of scatter plots. The nice thing about […]

by Hale Stewart  (originally published at Bonddad blog) Why Would Anybody Invest When Capacity Utilization is This Low? A central selling point of the tax bill is that it will encourage investment.  But that assumes that high tax rates were the primary reason why business wasn’t investing.  Instead, the data says business investment is weak because […]

Via the Economic Policy Intstitute: The Department of Labor (DOL) released a proposed rule that would allow restaurants to take the tips that servers earn and share them with untipped employees such as cooks and dishwashers.1 But, crucially, the rule doesn’t actually require that employers distribute “pooled” tips to workers. Under the administration’s proposed rule, as long as tipped […]

This chart caught my fancy after reading the interview with Rep. Tom Cole from the previous post. There is still the tendency to see the stock market (or GDP) as a proxy for the economy. And it is a time honored tradition for politicians to claim credit for economic gain in convoluted story telling: (I […]

An interview on CNBC with Rep.Tom Cole offers some insight into the path to voting yes on the tax bill… Alhough mainstream forecasters like the Joint Committee on Taxation and University of Pennsylvania have issued unflattering analyses of GOP proposals, Cole says his tax-committee colleagues tell him other models offer sunnier results in line with […]

In a rough way this calculator attempts to categorize who get cuts and who pays more: New York Times tax calculator