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 […]

It could . . . With the Senate vote tomorrow canceled on the Graham – Cassidy ACA defunding bill, the effort to defund and repeal the ACA will cease for the rest of this budget year ending September 30, 2017. With the passage of a new budget and a new resolution the effort could go […]

Worse Than The Usual Hypocrisy: Trump, Puerto Rico, And The Jones Act The Jones Act was passed 97 years ago to protect US shipping within the US from foreign-made ships.  I doubt I ever would have supported such an act, but at least back then there were plenty of US-made ships to fulfill the demand. […]

Being a parent of a child under 16 means trying to figure out ways to get said child from here to there, say from school to home, and from home to after school activities, and then back. There is often a fair amount of juggling involved – one or more, er, “caregivers” are typically involved […]

Last 21 Days ACA Healthcare History On September 7th and shortly after Pelosi and Schumer decided to be nonpartisan and help Republicans who still had an ounce of decency to pass hurricane Harvey aid and set a new National Debt Limit, I wrote about the inherent dangers of being so magnanimous. Lets face it, during […]

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 […]