Why I’m worried about the decline in real wages This is a follow-up to my post yesterday concerning the decline in real average and aggregate wages. Why should the data from just one month cause me to warn that “This is Bad?” To show you, let’s decompose the data into CPI and nominal aggregate wages, […]
Mark Perry Has Never Heard of William Baumol Otherwise why would Mark Perry write this nonsense: The chart above (thanks to Olivier Ballou) is an update of a chart we produced last year about this time, and shows the percent changes since January 1997 in the prices of selected consumer goods and services, along with the […]
Drastically Changing the Rules On Infrastructure Spending Most observers have figured out that the Trump infrastructure spending plan seems to be weirdly lopsided in an unrealistic way, with $200 billion in federal spending somehow supposed to inspire a total of $1.5 trillion in spending by state and local sources along with private ones. What has […]
“There’s many a fly got stuck in there.” Who is Charlie Kirk? He is the 24-year old executive director and founder of Turning Point USA. Jane Meyer profiled the organization in the New Yorker in December: Based outside of Chicago, Turning Point’s aim is to foment a political revolution on America’s college campuses, in part by […]
(Dan here…another post lifted from Robert’s Stochastic Thoughts) Contra Mannheim First rules of blogging. I type as I please.I haven’t read anything by Karl Mannheim but I think he wrote the phrase “social construction of truth”. I think that is a bad phrase and all use of it or similar phrases should be criticized. My […]
Hat tip Linda Beale contact forwards this Propublica job tracker post: What Happened to All the Jobs Trump Promised? President Trump has made many claims promising that individual companies such as Amazon, Alibaba and Boeing will hire large – and specific – numbers of American workers, a total of 2.4 million in all … We found that […]
The line in the movie The Sixth Sense, “I see dead people. They don’t know they’re dead.” Repubs; “I see Secret Societies, others do not know they exist. They are everywhere.” Daily Beast’s Rick Wilson; “The story was falling apart even before the Moron Caucus beclowned themselves with the ‘Secret Society’ meme (my addition), because […]
Kind of hard to ignore the blathering of a Republican jerk on the pay increase a school secretary will receive as a result of Trump/Republican tax break. Gosh darn, she can afford a Costco membership now! What an ass . . . He needs to go. Deleted by Ryan afterwards. Secretary was being sarcastic.
David Dayen at The Intercept points us to the latest on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: On Tuesday night, he (Trump)stood before the nation and boasted about the lowest unemployment rate on record for African-Americans. But just hours before his State of the Union address, his lieutenant and handpicked head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Mick Mulvaney, told […]
I’m not sure this is of general interest, but I would like to argue (again) with Glenn Greenwald. In this tweet, he asks an interesting and important question The FBI, and many Democrats, insisted vehemently that release of the Nunes Memo would endanger national security. Now that we’ve all read it, is there anyone who […]