Yves Smith has a very long post on Malcolm Gladwell: Yves here. Yasha Levine and Mark Ames have launched the S.H.A.M.E. Project, which stands for “Shame the Hacks who Abuse Media Ethics.” Its approach is to provide information about the background and funding sources of well-recognized journalists and pundits so that the public will be […]

by Noni Mausa Wealthy Non-Taxpayers — From 60 to Thousands in 30 Years Bruce Bartlett provides the numbers, but it’s so much easier to see in a chart. Wealthy Non-Taxpayers 1977 to 2009, showing incomes over $200,000 per year.  Blue is percentage of total households over $200,000 paying no taxes, purple is numbers of high-income […]

I was just poking around FRED as I do when I can’t sleep and I discovered something which amazed me (I am often amazed by my ignorance). Non mortgage delinguency rates are low. In fact the delinquency rate on credit card loans of all commercial banks is the lowest on record (records only go back […]

by Mike Kimel Variations on “Only Nixon Can Go to China” This is not a short post. Be forewarned. A few years ago, I co-authored a book called Presimetrics with Michael E. Kanell, a reporter for the Atlanta Journal Constitution. In the book, we tried to take an objective look at how Presidents performed on […]

Ah well…a whole generation of readers will mourn his passing. From an AP alert: Ray Bradbury, Master of Science Fiction, Dies at 91, A.P. Says Ray Bradbury, a master of science fiction whose lyrical evocations of the future reflected both the optimism and the anxieties of his own postwar America, died on Tuesday in Southern California. He […]

by Run 75441 America is an Opportunity Society (Rep Paul Ryan WI) “I’m personally offended that they’re playing a high-stakes game of chicken with our national defense,” fumed Weston Newton, chairman of the Beaufort County Council, after hearing Senator Graham’s dire warnings. . Lawmakers look for way out as defense cuts near. After agreeing to […]

John Sides at The Monkey Cage makes what seems to be an incredibly important point, at least for politico types. In the latest Pew report (PDF) that everyone’s nattering about, we see a big rise in “independent” voters over the last decade (to 38%). But: only 12% of respondents did not identify with or lean […]

BEA just published the state real GDP data for 2011.  Since I have not done it in a while I thought it would be interesting to create the state real GDP per capita data for 2011.  There has not been much difference since the last time I did this exercise several years ago.  The last […]

In a recent post I spoke with astonishment and admiration of an article/post by Ron Unz in the May issue of The American Conservative (he’s the publisher) that laid out a realistic, fact-based, cogent, and coherent portrait of our current economic situation. (I also pointed out that he 1. couched the post in an odd […]

Following up on some work I did a while back (Kuznets Revisited: Investment in the American Economy Since 1929), I got curious about what consumption has looked like in America over the last 80 years. I’ll give you the results first, as a proportion of output, or GDP, followed by explanation and discussion. Click for […]