– by New Deal democrat “it should be no surprise that Biden’s poll numbers have recently improved.” No big economic news today, so let me update a correlation with information from last Friday’s personal income data. To wit, is consumer sentiment about the economy tied to any real metric? With a lot of noise, it does […]

 – by New Deal democrat The Bonddad Blog The JOLTS report for February showed stabilization or slight improvement to all but one of its components, generally suggesting, well, stabilization in the overall jobs market. Starting with the monthly changes, job openings (blue in the graph below), a soft statistic that is polluted by imaginary, permanent, and […]

by Dale Coberly No. It’s not. Here is why. The argument for ending the tax on Social Security benefits seems to be that “it is a tax on a tax”, double taxing, and not fair. Even the good guys believe this. But they are wrong. Consider,  You pay income taxes on your ordinary income.  Then […]

 – by New Deal democrat The Bonddad Blog As usual, the new month’s data starts out with information on manufacturing and construction. To repeat what I have said often recently, these are the two sectors I am paying particular attention to for forecasting purposes this year. The ISM manufacturing index has been a good leading […]

When I think of the places on the planet that seem optimized for solar and wind power generation, I think of deserts like the Sahara and the desert Southwest in the US. And yet Germany is generating a growing share of its electricity through these renewables: “Preliminary data by energy market research group AG Energiebilanzen […]

Updates on Green House Gas and Climate Change. Rather than have readers flip from chart to chart on different pages, I consolidated the Green House Gas charts on one page. When it says see Figure 2 or 3, the chart is nearby and clearly marked. The update as marked on the original piece is Web […]

 – by New Deal democrat My “Weekly Indicators” post is up at Seeking Alpha. Regional Manufacturing Declines Again After several weeks of flirting with full recovery, the remaining regional Fed’s weighed in with their monthly manufacturing indexes, and they all went in the tank again. On the bright side, payroll tax withholding has had its best month […]

 – by New Deal democrat The Bonddad Blog Personal income and spending has become one of the two most important monthly reports I follow, because it nets out the impacts of higher interest rates and abating inflation due to the unlinking of the supply chain. To repeat, the big question this year is whether the […]

Starting April 1, fast-food workers in California will be paid at least $20 an hour, thanks to legislation passed last fall that raised the industry-wide minimum wage. Why? “the difference between the prices consumers pay and the cost of production—have increased sharply over the past decade of growth for the industry.” Roosevelt Institute Open Thread March […]

– By Tom Walker “The Unknown Unknown Marx,” EconoSpeak Toward the end of his 1968 essay, “The Unknown Marx,” Martin Nicolaus quoted Marx’s enumeration of four barriers to production under capital that “expose the basis of overproduction, the fundamental contradiction of developed capital.” Nicolaus qualified what Marx meant by overproduction to be “[not] simply ‘excess inventory’; […]