Linda is returning to blogging again. Welcome back. Dan by Linda Beale Finance Committee acts/doesn’t act on important Tax Court, Social Security, and HHS Appointments As the Senate Finance Committee continued work on its markup yesterday, it approved several important nominees for positions in the Social Security Administration and in the Tax Court, but […]
– by New Deal democrat The new parsimony I came across the below graph showing that relationship of average household net worth with average debt vs. the personal savings rate from the NY Fed last week (h/t The Conversable Economist): The important point was that the relationship has changed since the Great Recession. Even though […]
New York primary results: track the votes live Raw numbers are funny. But Trump’s admittedly massive victory tonight over his rivals doesn’t even mean he could deliver his own State in November. This works both ways. I am feeling the Bern but understand that his relative massive wins in the Mountain West don’t mean much […]
by Joseph Joyce The People’s Verdict on Globalization The similarities in the electoral appeals of businessman Donald Trump and Senator Bernie Sanders have been widely noted (see, for example, here, here and here). Both men attract voters who feel trapped in their economic status, unable to make progress either for themselves or their children. Moreover, […]
A story that is getting some traction, though mostly lost against the New York primary, is that for profit health insurance company United Health Care is looking to drop its Exchange Plans under PPACA. For example this from Fox: UnitedHealth pulls back on ObamaCare exchanges amid huge losses This is of course presented as some […]
by Sandwichman Zero-Sum Foolery 4 of 4: Wage Prisoner’s Dilemma Soon after the wages-fund doctrine fell out of favor with economists, it was immediately attributed to trade unionists under the label of the “fixed work-fund fallacy” and then the “Theory of the lump of labour.” In denunciations of the lump-of-labor fallacy, it has become fashionable […]
I’m getting really good at recognizing instantly the latest vapid or ridiculous soundbite that Clinton has settled on and will be repeating again and again. So I detected her latest one the moment she introduced it at last Thursday’s debate: It’s easy to diagnose the problem. You’ve got to be able to solve the problem. […]
by Sandwichman Foolery 1: Games Theory Gamesmanship Foolery 2: Doomsday Climate Machine Zero-Sum Foolery 3 of 4: Forecast Factory Long before the issue of anthropogenic climate change arrived on the doomsday agenda, Lewis F. Richardson anticipated climate modeling with his failed attempt to forecast weather numerically. His calculations predicted surface pressures 150 times higher than observed: […]
by Lynn Paramour (via Alternet) Is the 1% Really the Problem? “We are the 99 percent” is a great slogan, but is it distracting our attention from a sinister reality? There’s strong evidence that it’s not the 1 percent you should worry about—it’s the 0.1 percent. That decimal point makes a big difference. … The 99 […]