Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

May personal income and spending: consumer payback for Tariff-palooza! is a B!t©h

 – 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

“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 […]

Jobless claims indicate employment market continues to weaken, but still not recessionary

 – 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 […]

The National Science Foundation is homeless

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. […]

Hospitals at Risk of Closing Due to Funding and Due to Costs to Deliver Healthcare

I have used commentaries from the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform (www.CHQPR.org) previously at Angry Bear. While they do write about healthcare, they also cover the plight of providing healthcare. They would include medical personal rural hospitals, hospitals in general, costs of healthcare, and how the US government supports healthcare. Today, the issues […]

Just Some Grumbling and Politics

Republicans are letting rural hospitals, small hospitals, and hospitals at risk close in areas most in need of them due to a lack of funding. We also have t__mp’s Big Beautiful Bill to contend with in the Senate. Some Senators have shown support for it. And some Senators such as Thom Tillis have not shown […]

The Courts

Some history on judge appointments and what about the present with criminal defense lawyer, Emil Bove? A friend of Trump? Packing the Courts, Civil Discourse The date was February 5, 1937. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had just been reelected in a landslide, taking the Electoral College by a vote of 523 to 8 and winning the largest popular […]

Waste, fraud and abuse, thy name is DOGE

So far, the only “efficiencies” realized by DOGE have been (1) keeping Elon Musk’s name and image in the news and (2) the systematic destruction of federal programs and the expertise to run them efficiently. Like Elon’s SpaceX rockets, his DOGE has mostly failed on the launch. “On the first day of his second term, […]

Why Hundreds of Farmworkers Suddenly Vanished, Leaving Crops to Rot

It appears some bad times are coming for the United States. We are attacking the Labor that will do the jobs legal US Citizens will not do for the money paid to illegals and legal immigrants. “Ghost Farms of Texas: Why Hundreds of Farmworkers Suddenly Vanished, Leaving Crops to Rot” This sudden, unexplained exodus has […]