February CPI: a likely last hurrah for relatively tame consumer price increases  – by New Deal democrat Much like last month, February benefited from shelter and gas prices – for a change – pulling in the same, disinflating, direction. Needless to say, I do not expect that to be the case for March! But in the […]

– by New Deal democrat The Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) is “the gold standard of US employment measures. It is an actual census of 95%+ of all employers, who must report new employees for purposes like unemployment and disability benefits. Because of this, it is used for the final revisions, a/k/a bench-marks, for monthly […]

Our Republic is in great peril.  The democracy so proudly brought forth hangs in the balance. The ever-so critical upcoming midterms won’t be Democrats vs. Republicans; they will be we the people vs. them, democracy vs. autocracy and fascism.  Will be even more so if we make it to the 2028 elections (a huge if).  […]

The justifications for the war on Iran were kind of a dog’s breakfast. Among those mentioned were regime change and unconditional surrender, which promised a long commitment and boots on the ground. Looks like the stock market and oil prices got through to Cadet Bone Spurs. “What this all comes down to is that the […]

USA Facts asks the question, “Are wages keeping up with inflation?” It answers the quest and then provides the data to support its contention. Saying “Yes. From January 2025 to January 2026, wages grew 1.9 percentage points faster than inflation.” When you are listening to the news or reading an article in one of the […]

Commentary by Erica York at the Tax Foundation on the pass-through impact of tariffs on pricing in the United States. The other possibility is companies may they eat it for a short period of time and maybe pass it through later in the time-table. The idea being the United States may later drop the tariff […]

– by New Deal democrat So, first some bad news: my tech issue has resurfaced, so only links to graphs rather than graphs themselves, hopefully just for a day or two. Basically, unless I keep a bar up open to the blog page, Google and Apple sever their “handshake,” and I have to start from […]

I am not so sure this war will last any longer than Trump and his dwarfs are in office. Once gone, someone will decide differently. I thought we gave up nation – building a decade or so back when! This not a place for the US to be except for an occasional cleanup in Aisle […]

I pulled this bullet point information from Josh Bivens piece on the Economic Policy Institute: “The Trump administration’s macroeconomic agenda harms affordability and raises inequality,” Economic Policy Institute. Graph showing the difference in return over 40 years versus Trump’s tax break for the wealthy in one year. It is the same return. It is interesting […]

Having read the part of processing rare earths in China when the United States has a sufficent supply of rare earths to sustain US Processing. It may make sense to process rare earths in the US. The possesses significant rare earth element (REE) deposits estimated to be > than 3.6 million tons. There are major […]