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

Depleting our environmental trust fund

Climate change is already doing a lot of harm. One of the harms is the drying of land masses. The people who live on these land masses depend on fresh water not only to drink but to grow crops for food. As surface water disappears, humanity is dipping into the corpus of its geological endowment, […]

New Deal democrats Weekly Indicators for July 21 – 25

 – by New Deal democrat My “Weekly Indicators” post is up at Seeking Alpha. With the continued pause in actual tariff increases, the data has rebounded basically across the board from April and May. Even the long leading indicators have improved somewhat, led by some un-inversions of the yield curve and the improvement in corporate profits as […]

The Worst of Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ Will Be Felt in Rural America

As one commenter elsewhere stated: “Rural America hospitals in red states have been closing at an epidemic rate because the states refused to expand Medicaid under the ACA. Rural hospitals in blue states generally survive. The red states do not seem to care. Congress has not passed bills to save those red state rural hospitals” […]

Postal Service Changes Have a Disproportionate Impact on Rural Areas

The results of US Postmaster General Louis Dejoy’s efforts to improve US Postal Service in the United States. Steve Hutkins and Mark Jamison have been following USPS issues for years and they have been featured on Angry Bear going back to 2016. This particular piece has been taken from Steve Hutkins site: “Save the Post […]

The future of journalism

Jonathan Last has an excellent piece at The Bulwark on the clusterf*** that is the Bezos WaPo and what it says about the business model of journalism in America. “The internet revolution was about lowering to zero the marginal cost of distributing content. The AI revolution is about lowering to zero the marginal cost of […]

New home sales continue rangebound, prices continue to decline, inventory continues to rise

 – by New Deal democrat This morning’s report on new home sales for June indicated that sales continue to be rangebound, YoY prices continue to decline, and inventory of homes for sale continue to rise. This complicates the story of rebalancing between new and existing homes. To recapitulate, while new home sales are the most leading measure […]

Trump wants to end capital gains tax on home sales

Recently, Trump said he was “thinking about” ending capital gains taxes on home sales. Who benefits? “The biggest beneficiaries of such a change will likely be longtime homeowners in the country’s more expensive housing markets. “Removing or increasing the capital gains limit — currently $250,000 for single homeowners or $500,000 for married couples — on […]