by Kenneth Thomas New OECD tax agreement improves transparency — but the US doesn’t sign and the US press won’t tell you UPDATED Last week 31 countries signed a new Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) agreement providing for country-by-country corporate information reporting and the automatic exchange of tax info between countries under the […]
by Linda Beale Should simplicity be a primary goal of tax reform? I was at a housewarming party last Saturday and talked to quite a few people I didn’t know. One was an economics professor at a regional school. Naturally, economists and tax professors gravitate towards talk about the economy and tax policies, so it […]
by New Deal democrat Consumer Expenditures Survey: incomes rose sharply from June 2014-June 2015 A major piece of data came out last week that has been totally unreported in the media and econoblogosphere: the Consumer Expenditures Survey (CES) for June 2014- June 2015. This is the first CES report to include the period of rapidly […]
The US suicide rate has increased dramatically (via Kevin Drum whose commentary is excellent as usual) I have two thoughts about possible causes One hand gun ownership. I know the rate of gun ownership has declined (always explained by the alleged decline in hunting). It is rare for people to kill themselves with rifles. I […]
by Kenneth Thomas Breakthrough in Kansas-Missouri Border War Via @goodjobsfirst, we learned Friday that Kansas Governor Sam Brownback had made a major response to Missouri’s proposed jobs truce in the Kansas City region. As regular readers may recall, studies have shown that more than $200 million has been spent moving jobs back and forth across […]
by Peter Dorman (from Econospeak) Pet Peeve: An America that Sees Only Itself This is a small but typical example: the New York Times today ran a story about frictions in the switch to embedded-chip credit cards. The process has been bumpy, and retailers think the banks and payment processors have been exploiting them, while […]
Regular AB readers know that from time to time I post links to web pages concerning animal welfare matters, including special-event donation request links, and so here’s another one, which I received in an email this afternoon. And here’s the sort-0f pun intended.
In an op-ed at the New York Times yesterday, Nick Hanauer and Robert Reich made the following observation: In a cruel twist, the longer and harder we work for the same wage, the fewer jobs there are for others, the higher unemployment goes and the more we weaken our own bargaining power. That helps explain why […]
by New Deal democrat The best measure of labor market recoveries: March 2016 update In my opinion the best measure of how average Americans are doing in an economic expansion isn’t jobs, and it isn’t wages per hour. Rather, it is real aggregate wage growth. This is calculated as follows: average wages per hour for […]