A longer-than-planned post on today’s Supreme Court opinion on state-college-admissions affirmative action programs. (I’m up in Michigan’s Thumb region, sans cable and regular web service, and using my phone as a Wi Fi hotspot via the PdaNet app. I can attest that PdaNet is awesome.) Here it is: The headline on Politico reads, “SCOTUS passes […]
by Linda beale Market Power, Minimum Wages, and the Sins of Friedmania Two items caught my attention in today’s (June 22) newspapers and they represent diametrically opposed positions on what matters in society. One, by Paul Krugman, deals with the problems of monopoly rents–especially in industries in which there is very little production in this […]
This simple ~ 4 minute recording comes from Colin Gordon’s “Growing Apart A Political History of American Inequality” . Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism picks up on it also. It is a good read in its entirety. Economists View also has it on today’s links. The video portion below gives a snap shot of what […]
As long since noted by Krugman, for the monetary authority to be able to stimulate demand when the safe short term interest rate is almost exactly zero, it has to be able to credibly pre-commit to causing high inflation, by keeping that interest rate extremely low in the future when the economy has recovered and […]
The quick and dirty rule of thumb is that the relationship between bond yields and the S&P 500 PE is one-to-one. That is, 100 basis point change in bond yields should cause about a 100 basis point change in the PE. Since WWII, the long term trend for earnings growth has been some 7%, or […]
For me, Profits Without Production equates to Profits sans Direct Labor Input. In most manufacture in the US today, Direct Labor Input is an extremely small ~10% of the Cost of Manufacturing which will vary up and down dependent upon the industry. (For the accountants and the purists, this does not include customary or legislative […]
by Linda Beale The importance of redistribution I have dedicated ataxingmatter to a concept I call “democratic egalitarianism”–the idea that individuals flourish best in a free society that allows them to choose democratically the rules that govern their lives, with the understanding that the institutions must be sustainable and must allow all individuals to flourish, […]
Are the most difficult to bear in life. I would be lost. http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2013/06/the-saddest-news.html
by Linda Beale The Tax Code Ain’t Nearly So Big as Often Claimed I can’t resist pointing readers to tax professor Jim Maule’s excellent post chastising everybody–from those obviously slanted propaganda-tank tax gurus Chris Edwards (you all know him as the purported tax expert from the right-wing pseudo-libertarian Cato Institute, whose other associate, Dan Mitchell, […]