The December employment report showed a continuation of the past few months trend as payroll employment rose 103,000 and the household survey showed a gain of 297,000. Theunemployment rate fell to 9.4%, but almost half of the drop was due to a 260,000 drop in the labor force. The gains in payroll employment reflected a […]

As the CUTGO Congress attempts to return to the spending ways of 2001-2008, the parallels grow clearer. A simple table to allow easy comparison of the major initiatives of 2001 and 2011 is presented below.

(cross posted at SocialSecurityDefender.blogspot.com) Well the first line of attack is opening up. Lindsay Graham is threatening to hold up the Debt Limit Increase Bill, and so potentially throw this whole country and perhaps the world into default unless he gets cuts to Social Security. This is insane on several levels, not least because the […]

Lifted from an e-mail from Beverly Mann, the following is a short explanation and links to relevant cases concerning the words of Justice Scalia as reported in California Lawyer, second question down from the beginning about the 14th amendment and sex discrimination. Beverly Mann writes: Scalia: Only African-Americans Have Second Amendment Rights Against States! Here […]

by Mike KimelScientists, Republicans and ConservativesCross posted at the Presimetrics blog. According to a Pew poll, only 6% of scientists self-identify as Republicans, and only 9% as conservative. Figure 1 Birds of a feather and all of that. I meant to post on this a while back – I’m about a year and a half […]

by Bruce Webb Conservatives have long been 2nd Amendment Absolutists (unless you are a black man carrying a stick outside a mostly black precinct in Philadelphia, somehow ‘open carry’ doesn’t apply there). Now they have doubled down with the Tenther Movement, which they have tied together with an Enumerated Powers doctrine which mostly doesn’t actually […]

The Reserve Bank of New Zealand released a paper by Nicolas Groshenny last month—I’m behind on planning for Chanukkah; that I got to a paper from New Zealand about U.S. monetary policy this soon is, er, probably one of the reasons why—in which he evaluates the counterfactual of following the “Taylor Rule” from 2002 to […]

Facts or Fallacies Part III: Combinations, Murder and the Primordial Lumpby Tom Walker (Sandwichman at Ecological Headstand) In Part I, I compared the statistical fact that non-farm employment was lower in September 2010 than it had been in December 1999 with the assertions that those who believed any such thing could occur were guilty of […]

by Tom aka Rusty Rustbelt The Pain of Economic Change Michigan is the only state in the union showing a net negative population trend in the recent census report, and is an interesting case study of the pain of economic change. For several decades after WWII, Michigan enjoyed above average prosperity on the backs of […]

Bruce has made this point repeatedly. Dr. Black puts it in more direct language: [I]nevitably the Social Security Trustees will, perfectly justifiably, tweak a few assumptions about future economic activity so that there will be a DOOM scenario, an EVERYTHING’S AWESOME scenario, and a “uh oh maybe in about 40 years we will have a […]