A new article at consumerreports.org suggests that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act* (PPACA) played a substantial role in the decline of annual personal bankruptcies that we have seen since the high of 1.5 million in 2010. As I showed several years ago, international bankruptcy data support the oft-heard claim that medical bills make […]
This isn’t actually news, but it’s news to me, and it’s something you need to know. Greg LeRoy sent me an article by James Meek in London Review of Books (20 April 2017) that he’d been sent by a friend, documenting more EU-permitted job piracy by Poland that preceded the case I discuss at length […]
I’ve discussed the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Reports before, an excellent source of data for both wealth and wealth inequality. The most recent edition, from November 2016, shows the United States getting wealthier, but steadily more unequal in wealth per adult and dropping from 25th to 27th in median wealth per adult since 2014. Moreover, […]
We’ve gotten to another point where it’s hard for me to turn on the TV. I know this will have to change, but for now I’ll go back to one of my favorite topics, the fate of Ireland under austerity. As I suggested might happen, Ireland in its 2015-2016 immigration statistical year (May-April) was finally […]
As I explained last week, Donald Trump was elected to the Presidency despite having fewer votes than Hillary Clinton. She has already set a record for the biggest popular vote victory despite losing the Electoral College; according to CNN, she now (11/17/16 5:00am EST) leads by about 1,045,000 votes, roughly twice the margin of Al […]
For the second time in just 16 years, the new President is actually the loser of the national popular vote (click on “Popular Vote”). This is the fifth time this has happened in U.S. history; the last time it happened prior to 2000 was in 1888. As children, we were all taught to believe in […]
A new report by Good Jobs First confirms what has been long-suspected: Data center megadeals of over $50 million in subsidies create very few jobs at a cost per job that easily exceeds $1 million. Indeed, the average for 11 megadeals going to tech giants like Google, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft came to $1.8 million […]
I have argued many times (most directly here) that, contrary to the claims of nearly all Irish policymakers, low taxes are not what makes the Irish economy tick. The country experienced 30 years of low taxes with no gain on average European income; it was only after 1987 that other policy changes (education, EU-funded […]
$19 billion? $8 billion? A few hundred million? Estimates are all over the map regarding the European Commission’s imminent decision on whether Apple received illegal, unnotified state aid (subsidies) from Ireland. As I mentioned two years ago, two factors go into the Commission’s claim: Ireland’s creation of a corporate entity that is taxable nowhere, and […]
Subsidy Tracker, the free subsidy database created in 2010 by Good Jobs First, has reached major milestones in its coverage of state, local, and federal subsidies. This month’s enhancements to the database bring it to a once-unimaginable 500,000 individual incentive awards with a cumulative nominal subsidy value of $250 billion! That’s starting to add up […]