The Kurdish Independence Vote Buried on the back pages of this busy week has been the news that in Iraqi Kurdistan on Monday there was a referendum on independence reportedly supported by 92% of the voters. I imagine that is not inaccurate, and that there was strong support for this referendum, even as Kurdistan Regional […]
Trump’s Refusal to Release His Own Tax Returns and California’s Legislature As most everyone is aware, Trump has refused to release his tax returns, breaking precedent with decades of presidential candidates and president’s release of tax returns. Even Dick Cheney, grumpy corporatist veep, released his tax returns. I had fun using them as the raw […]
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 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 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, […]
How I Came To No Longer Be A Kaldorian Economist Yes, for a period of time, according to some sources, I was a member of the “Kaldorian” school of Post Keynesian economic thought, although I had not previously thought of myself as such, indeed, had been unaware that there even was such a school of […]
As a follow up to my post on homicides in 2016, I decided to combine homicide data from the FBI with figures from the police shooting database from the Washington Post. The only difficulty is that the FBI classifies people as being from Black, White, Other, or Unknown races, whereas the Washington Post breaks out […]
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 […]
The FBI just released data on homicides for 2016. In light of the various protests by the BLM and now football players, I thought I’d provide a a graph. It breaks out population, homicide perpetrators and homicide victims by race. (click to embiggen) Note… the number of offenders exceeds the number of victims. This is […]