I’m surprised that nobody highlights what for me is the key takeaway from that report. They predict, with a $10.10/indexed increase: Low-end incomes increase $19 billion. High-end incomes decline $17 billion. For a net GDI increase of $2 billion. Table 1, page 2: Pie gets bigger, all that rot. The increase is presumably explained by […]

Thomas Piketty’s important new book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, predicts a bleak future of increasing concentrations of financial assets in few hands, stagnant wages and labor share of income, and declining returns to capital — secular stagnation. He enunciates and demonstrates the part of Marx that Marx got exactly right. But Dean Baker points out where […]

Oh, my — not only was Paul Ryan’s hunger=dignity speech appalling on the merits, the anecdote he used to make his point was fake — a distortion of a real story with a completely different point. I’m actually not happy with this discovery; the crucial point here should be that even if the story of the kid who wants […]

Lifted from comments to Calculated Risks aside on cash for clunkers.  Spencer says: I get so tired of seeing people evaluate the cash of clunkers and ignoring the impact on auto inventories. During the cash for clunkers auto and light truck inventories fell from 2.7 months of sales to1.6 months of sales — the norm […]

Sometimes comments at Angry Bear and other sites get to resemble an exchange of slogans, statements of faith on particular macro economic policies using tax cuts and government spending as political stimulus rather than economic, and proof of validity premised on how forceful one is. At one time or another we all fall into that […]

I just couldn’t skip this one…disinhibition and odd “metaphor” combined: Lynn Parramour writes:   Thomas Ferguson and Robert Johnson of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, two economists who have tried to expose the problems in their field, remind us that even when you look at the evidence of recent reports of the trustees overseeing […]

From the New York Times According to the plaintiffs in the new case, the Supreme Court has not overruled a statutory precedent in an area in which Congress has been active since 1961, in a tax case. But lawyers for the defendants said the 1988 decision was entitled to “lessened precedential weight” because it was […]

Most conservatives disparage minimum-wage laws with straightforward economic reasoning, based on Econ 101 textbook theory: demand curves slope down. If you institute a price floor, raising the price of labor, you’ll get less labor demanded — less jobs. This hurts poor people, especially entry-level folks like teenagers. At first blush, the argument’s got legs. And […]

Because we won. Or more precisely I won. Because we are not that much closer to the adoption of the Coberly inspired Northwest Plan than before, despite the fact that similar plans poll spectacularly positive. But mostly all the ‘Reform’ plans for an ‘unsustainable’ Social Security system are running scared from the Senator Warren and […]