Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

Part of Patriotism is Paying Taxes

Part of Patriotism is Paying Taxes As Americans, we pay taxes to allow our government to support important activities that we as individuals or individual businesses either can’t do at all or can’t do as successfully.  Both individuals and businesses benefit from government, so that paying taxes is a wonderful exercise in patriotism. For individuals, […]

A thought for Sunday: of basic decency and humanity, and how the economy is shoring up the GOP

A thought for Sunday: of basic decency and humanity, and how the economy is shoring up the GOP A few threads of the Trump malAdministration came together this past week. The latest attempt to overturn Obamacare confronted Trump with a choice between his two main goals: basking in a Trump triumph vs. erasing all of […]

Republicans’ Refusal to Understand Insurance Still Matters

When attempting to repeal and not really replace Obamacare, various Republicans demonstrated opposition to the idea of insurance. They objected that healthy people shouldn’t subsidize the health care of sick people — that is their honest view of health insurance is that they are against it. I didn’t keep track of recent examples, googled, and […]

Ex-hurricane trend in September industrial production is positive

Ex-hurricane trend in September industrial production is positive As I outlined earlier this week, a reasonable temporary workaround for industrial production unaffected by the recent hurricanes is to average the 4 regional Fed surveys, minus Dallas, plus the Chicago PMI. Over the long run, each +5 in the average of the indexes is consistent with […]

Trump’s “Give the Rich a Break” Tax Plan

Trump’s “Give the Rich a Break” Tax Plan National GOP leaders on Wednesday released a 9-page document that they called a tax “framework” (available here on the Washington Post site) describing in vague terms how they intend to cut taxes for the nation’s wealthiest people while doing very little that serves the government needs. Overall, […]

Wow! Yellin confirms 2% inflation is the Fed’s ceiling

Wow! Yellin confirms 2% inflation is the Fed’s ceiling You may have already seen this elsewhere, but in case you didn’t, Janet Yellin all but officially confirmed the other day that 2% isn’t in fact the Fed’s target, it’s their ceiling. Per the New York Times: Given that monetary policy affects economic activity and inflation […]

A hurricane workaround for industrial production

A hurricane workaround for industrial production Last week I mentioned that the regional Fed surveys plus the Chicago PMI can be used as a workaround to account for the effects of hurricanes on Industrial Production. It isn’t pretty and by no means is it perfect, but for the (hopefully only) two or three months that […]

Gentrification

by Peter Dorman (originally published at Econospeak) Gentrification This is the bane of urban development, right? Old housing stock, built for yesterday’s working class, is spiffed up and priced far out of reach of today’s regular folk. High end shops replace hardware stores, bric-a-brac recyclers and appliance repair centers; a tide of designer coffee flushes […]

Insanely Concentrated Wealth Is Strangling Our Prosperity

Dan here…Angry Bear Steve Roth’s clear and thorough writing continues…please go to the original for more graphs…I could not include the largest in the Angry Bear format in its proper place.  Go straight to read more to view the whole post…. By Steve Roth (originally published at Evonomics) Insanely Concentrated Wealth Is Strangling Our Prosperity […]