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

The Seattle Study: Increasing the Minimum Wage as a Way to Boost High Income Jobs

by Peter Dorman (originally published at Econospeak) The Seattle Study: Increasing the Minimum Wage as a Way to Boost High Income Jobs As labor market mavens all know by now, the University of Washington team chosen by the city of Seattle to evaluate its minimum wage law has issued a new report.  This one is […]

Explaining the Gender Wage Gap

From Thomas Edsall in the NY Times At one end of the scale, men continue to dominate. In 2016, 95.8 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs were male and so were 348 of the Forbes 400. Of the 260 people on the Forbes list described as “self-made,” 250 were men. Wealth — and the ability to […]

Seattle Minimum Wage

Words cannot describe the torment experienced by the data before they confessed what the University of Washington team got them to confess. I can only urge readers with an open mind to study Table 3 carefully. The average wage increase, from the second quarter of 2014 to the third quarter of 2016, for all employees […]

Senate healthcare bill costs 15 million their health insurance next year, 22 million by 2026

One consequence of electing the popular vote loser is that the official winners act as if they have a mandate for the most extreme version of their policies. Thus, we have proposed legislation, the misleadingly titled Better Care Reconciliation Act, that will not only roll back Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid, but impose further large cuts […]

Senate AHCA Version – Premium Increases and Subsidy Reductions

CBPP has this pictorial analysis of the increased premiums resulting from the Senate version of the AHCA for a 60 year old at 350% FPL with an ACA Silver plan. “For a 60-year-old with income of 350 percent of the poverty level (about $42 ,000 today) facing the average premium on HealthCare.gov, out-of-pocket premiums would […]

Asking The Man in the Street: Research v. Rhetoric

Richard Layard, How to Beat Unemployment, 1986: “If you ask the man in the street (not Wall Street) what has caused our unemployment, nine times out of ten he will say that it is machines displacing people. In fact for this reason he is often deeply pessimistic about whether we could ever have full employment […]

BCRA CBO Score

WASHINGTON (AP) — Congressional Budget Office sees 22 million more uninsured by 2026 under Senate health bill. Toher Spiro appears to be snipping and tweeting the key bits of the CBO report Premiums for a 64-year old with middle income go from $6,800 under ACA to $20,500 under BCRA Deductibles for plans eligible for tax […]

Gay Pride Around the World

We begin in the US: …the Dyke March Collective also ejected three people carrying Jewish Pride flags (a rainbow flag with a Star of David in the center). According to one of those individuals—A Wider Bridge Midwest Manager Laurel Grauer—she and her friends were approached a number of times in the park because they were […]