Brad DeLong adds his voice to the people addressing the retirement woes of many: Edward Filene’s idea from the 1920s of having companies run employer-sponsored defined-benefit plans has, by and large, come a-crashing down. Companies turn out not to be long-lived enough to run pensions with a high enough probability. And when they are there […]
Joseph Stiglitz offers perspective on the bankruptcy of Detroit and its wider context: At one level, one might shrug: companies die every day; new ones are born. That is part of the dynamics of capitalism. So, too, for cities. Maybe Detroit and cities like it are just in the wrong location for the goods and […]
As I said, I was going to post a version of the circular flow model for current conditions of the economy. Setting up the model Conditions for national accounts and other numbers are currently… (See these graphs CGINX, XM, Undistprof) Real GDP of $15.650 trillion. (2009 dollars) Effective demand limit of $16.1 trillion. (real 2009 […]
We interrupt our daily coverage for this moment of humor: Congress Fiercely Divided Over Completely Blank Bill That Says And Does Nothing WASHINGTON—A blank piece of legislation that says nothing, does nothing, and contains no text whatsoever has been the source of heated debate in Washington this week, and has sharply divided Congress along partisan lines, Beltway sources confirmed […]
I want to expand on the last post where a simplified circular flow model was given incorporating labor share of income. That circular flow did not include sectors for a government nor foreign markets. I now will expand that model to include those sectors and more. Extended circular flow for labor share Here is the […]
Yves Smith gives Angry Bear Edward Lambert a nod in Profitless stocks, Underinvestment, and the cannibalization of labor, and levitating stock prices. As this trend has accelerated, we’ve also seen falling levels of corporate investment. As I noted in a 2005 article, companies were net savers, which was unheard of at any time other than in […]
Paul Krugman points to Angry Bear Robert Waldmann in two separate posts this week here and here. by Robert Waldmann “Ricardo offers us the supreme intellectual achievement, unattainable by weaker spirits, of adopting a hypothetical world remote from experience as though it were the world of experience and then living in it consistently. With most […]
Reader Denis Drew writes (lifted from comments) : The bottom 50% of America’s workforce now takes 12% of overall income. If the federal minimum wage is raised to $15/hr that will add 3.6% direct inflation. $15/hr being today’s median wage, half the workforce, 70 million employees receiving an average $8,000/yr raise would add $560 billion […]
From the Huffington Post comes a note on who else is using NSA data in some fashion: A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans. Although these cases […]
by Linda Beale The Right’s Goal–end the one tax expenditure that truly aids poor working families The Tax Foundation, that propaganda tank that masquerades as a “nonpartisan” “think” tank, is at it again. Now it’s pushing the right-wing agenda of ending any tax expenditures that redistribute resources down to those in the lower-income distributions. It’s […]