The vulgar side of Robert Reich. “Office Hours: WTF do they tell themselves?” As Trump siphons away their power, how do congressional Republicans justify to themselves their total abdication of responsibility? Trump’s decision to strike Iran without congressional authorization has renewed debate over Congress’s constitutional role in the use of American forces. At almost every […]
I do not see much commotion about this occurring. It is almost like an “oh well” moment as people sit back and wait for it to happen. Yesterday, I gave readers a table of contents for three separate posts as itemized here: “Rural Hospitals at Risk of Closing,” Angry Bear. The prior sentence listing the […]
How anti-worker policies, crony capitalism, and privatization keep the South locked out of shared prosperity: Rooted in Racism and Economic Exploitation: Part Five, Economic Policy Institute EPI’s Nina Mast covers how Southern lawmakers blocked shared prosperity by neglecting basic worker protections and disinvesting in social safety net programs while offering hefty subsidies to corporations, privatizing […]
Personal Income and Outlays . . . “Personal Income and Outlays, May 2025, U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis,” BEA Personal income decreased $109.6 billion (0.4 percent at a monthly rate) in May, according to estimates released today by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. Disposable personal income (DPI)—personal income less personal current taxes—decreased $125.0 billion […]
Nate Silver makes lemonade from lemons: “Is Trump less popular than he was a few weeks ago? Yes. Is he now firmly underwater on his best issue (immigration)? Also yes. But he’s still more popular today than he was at this point during his first term. On day 159 of term 1, Trump’s net approval […]
– by New Deal democrat The last significant data for the first half of 2025, personal income and spending for May, was released this morning. It was the first month that reflected the impact of Tariff-palooza!, and boy howdy was it impacted. Not a single metric was positive. One metric was unchanged; everything else was negative. […]
“Rural_Hospitals_at_Risk_of_Closing,” Center for Healthcare Quality & Payment Reform The issue being detailed here being: Smaller and rural hospitals are under the threat of closing as the Tr__p administration cuts funding to pay for the 2017 tax break. A tax break which Trump promised it would pay for itself. It did not. So, Tr__p will keep […]
– by New Deal democrat Jobless claims continue to tell us two things: (1) the jobs market continues to slowly weaken, but (2) it is not recessionary. This week I’ve changed my graphing scheme slightly, to emphasize the less noisy four week moving average of initial claims, to better show the residual post-COVID seasonality, and to […]
What the US thinks It is Number 1 in and its actual rankings . . . June 21, 2025, “Occupy Democrats,” Facebook One could only wish! Various comments on that Facebook page.
During my career, I was principal investigator on three NSF grants. I also served on five grant review panels for the NSF. The NSF always struck me as a tightly run, parsimonious science agency. They are scrupulous about *not* funding biomedical research, so as not to compete with the much bigger National Institutes of Health. […]