A Compromise on Liability So Mitch McConnell and the senate Republicans want blanket employer liability protection as the price of another round of economic support. They have this leverage because Democrats kept postponing their agenda until they were the only ones with a list of things they wanted to spend money on. (This illustrates classic bargaining theory […]
Woke Is Reactionary: The Small Business Lending Edition We live in a drastically unequal society. Everywhere you look you will find injustice, constraint and exploitation. Being a member of a racial or other minority increases the odds you will end up on the short end, so what should we do about it? There’s a progressive […]
New coronavirus cases vs. testing in “reopened” States Are new coronavirus infections increasing in States that “reopened” on or about May 1? The jury is still out. The number of infections is up in 4 of the 5 biggest States that have done so, but so are the number of tests. The likelihood that most […]
I am interested in critiquing my understanding of the simplest SIR epidemiological model and also praising a critique of an effort to extend the model and guide policy developed by some very smart economic theorists. First the useful point is that this post by Noah Smith is brilliant. As is typical, Smith argues that the […]
The Greater Good “If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.” — Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow Originally written in 2018 on the Save The Post Office blog and featured at Angry Bear in 2019, retired North Carolina Post Master Mark Jamison wrote on the issues facing […]
bu Dale Coberly WHAT THE TRUSTEES REPORT REALLY MEANS REALLY “DOING THE MATH” [a few years ago the word “du jour” among journalists about SS was “it’s the math.” Of ourse none of them actually did the math.] [note: i use the tax rate for each the worker and the employer because this is what […]
by Dale Coberly WHAT THE TRUSTEES REPORT ACTUALLY SAYS WORST CASE: we wait until 2035 and then have to raise the payroll tax 4.13% (2% for workers, 2% for employers) in order to pay for promised benefits. OR have to cut benefits by 25%.The trade-off is about 20 dollars per week […]
This was the first pass (Ernie Tedeschi of Evercore prepared the data) and it is arranged by the percentage of loans completed in each state. As you can see Nebraska received ~81% of the loans applied for by the small businesses in Nebraska. One million, 35 thousand and 86 SBA PPP Loans (1,035, 086) were […]
The actual US coronavirus trajectory: “flattening the curve” at least until 2021 “Flattening the curve” was not such an appetizing option either, because it meant that *everybody* got infected with the disease during the period of flattening, and so the death toll would still be horrifying, perhaps 1% to 3%. It also meant that the […]
It should be worth noting that the federal deficit under Trump is already at 5% of GDP even before the Coronavirus stimulus begins. Figure 1 Interestingly, if you look at the long term record the only policy or strategy that fits the data is the Republican policy of starve the beast. That policy is to […]