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

Fallout for People Insured During Covid with the Passage of Trump’s Bill and Government Subsidies Ending

Lower-income person paying 2% of their income on their premium for healthcare insurance pre-covid, now pay nothing. Higher income people currently pay no more than 8.5% of their income on their premium. Pre-covid they were originally ineligible for financial assistance. All of this will change with the passage of Trump’s bill. Enhanced subsidies for Affordable […]

The state of freight

 – by New Deal democrat It is very difficult to track the impacts of Tariff-palooza! on the US supply chain, due to delays in any sort of accurate reporting. But below is the best overall picture I have been able to decipher. Mainly the delay is focused on the trucking industry, because rail is very concentrated […]

Subsidizing the Upper Income Citizens by Stiffing Lower Income Citizens

“Distributional Effects of H.R. 1, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act” CBO and the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) analysis of the budgetary and distributional effects of H.R. 1 or the “One Beautiful Piece of ? as passed on May 22, 2025. CBO estimates, on average, household resources would increase over the […]

House Bill and Healthcare

One of the programs in play is reductions in Medicaid and Market Place provisions to pay for the tax breaks to a few. Cutting these programs will result in higher deficits also. Reductions in Medicaid and Marketplace provisions will reduce the roughly $1 trillion in ten-year federal savings these provisions generate thereby magnifying the beautiful […]

New 21 month high in the four-week average of initial claims; and new 3.5 year high in continuing claims. But no recession signal

 – by New Deal democrat This week’s update in jobless claims was decidedly mixed. Initial claims were unchanged at 248,000. Nevertheless this level was only equaled once and exceeded once in the past year. The four week moving average increased 5,000 to 240,500, the highest number since September 2023. With the typical one week delay, continuing […]

Consumer price inflation: once again, all clear except for (slowly disinflating) shelter

 – by New Deal democrat The story of consumer prices in May is the same as it has been for the past several months: virtually everything except for shelter costs, and the even more lagging sector of transportation services, were somnolent. If the Fed wanted to, it could have declared victory many months ago. To […]

Deportation for thee but not for me

Stephen Miller has pointed ICE to Home Depots as magnets for undocumented workers (usually gathered outside, hoping to snag a day’s work). But to paraphrase Willie Sutton, why not go where the immigrants are? “Undocumented immigrants are concentrated in cities for various reasons but by no means only in cities. Cities have communal and ethnic […]

On Distribution

Part II of II Due to automation (The Digital Age) and the offshoring of production (Globalization), since the early 1970s, we have seen less demand for labor lead to fewer production workers with less bargaining power settling for lower wages, leading to significantly less wealth being distributed to fewer of the population.  For this and […]

Updating some high frequency metrics for economic activity

 – by New Deal democrat There’s no new important data again today, so let me update a few high frequency indicators in which I am looking for signs of weakness. First, Redbook’s consumer retail sales weekly report came out this morning, showing a 4.7% YoY increase. This is one of the 8 lowest increases in the […]

A look at the goods producing sector

 – by New Deal democrat As per usual for the week after the employment report, there is no new data until Wednesday’s CPI report. So let’s take a further look at some of the information from Friday’s report, as well as several other reports from last week in the goods-producing and sales sector. In the 40 […]