Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

Bowyer’s Profits Per Job Measure: Do Two Wrongs Make

Forgive me for not finishing the title here, but after reading how Brad DeLong reacted to the latest Buzzcharts, to say there could be anything right about Jerry Bowyer’s series would be a farce. Brad writes: A huge number of people who are on payrolls don’t work for corporations: 21 million of them work for […]

David Altig’s Defense of Cato’s Free Lunch Claim

For the life of me, I don’t understand why a smart and honest conservative economist like David Altig would defend the Cato Institute’s claims as to the alleged benefits of privatization. To be fair, David is not saying there is some free lunch. Rather, he objects to this post from Mark Thoma by asserting that […]

After the Housing Boom: Impact on the Economy

When the housing boom ends, what is the possible impact on the US economy? This is a broad brush look at three major potential problems: 1) Increased Unemployment.2) Loss of mortgage equity withdrawal on consumer spending.3) Financial distress. Unemployment Last week’s post (Housing: After the Boom) looked back at the early ’90s housing bust. In […]

Neal Boortz On Our Foreign Dependence on Oil

Neal Boortz tells his listeners: “But the left doesn’t want us to reduce our reliance on foreign oil”, which drew a response from the Mahablog. Maybe Neil thinks the House GOP leadership is leftist given today’s comments from Edward Markey.

Will the Cato Institute Even Offer a Reply to Mark Thoma?

Our friend Mark Thoma is fairly new to blogging, but he has already figured out that Cato crowd lies a lot with respect to the Social Security debate. The most recent “Daily Debunker” from Cato discusses the Johnson-Flake proposal, which sounds to me like an old song: (a) reduce government expenditures by switching from wage […]

Tech Support Angry Bear Now Searchable

Deleted Request for Help getting the Google Search Box to work That was easy. I just had to change the sitesearch value from value=”http://www.angrybear.blogspot.com” to value=”angrybear.blogspot.com” You may now search angrybear! AB

NRO’s BuzzCharts: Clinton Years Were Highly Profitable

Jerry Bowyer has produced some incredibly bizarre spin with his BuzzCharts rants with the latest being an attack on something Paul Krugman recently wrote (surprise). These BuzzCharts might provide great examples of how to lie with statistics, but the latest chart seems to say something other than what Jerry wrote: Although BuzzCharts does not believe […]

Healthcare Wrap Up

Barring an unanticipated follow-up or two, I think our series on healthcare is done and now archived in the “Topics” section to your left. Here are the posts, in order: The Real Crisis (Kash) Health Care in The U.S. And The World, Part I: How much do we spend? (AB) Performance of the US Health […]

Responding to a Revaluation

Greenspan’s remarks about a possible renminbi revaluation also make me wonder exactly what the Fed would do if and when China does revalue. Mark Thoma and David Altig (among others) have had some interesting things to say about this question recently. I want to do a more in-depth treatment if these issues in the future, […]

Greenspan on the Renminbi

I’ve broken this into two posts, since it was getting rather lengthy. First, let me point out some interesting remarks by Alan Greenspan yesterday. He was, at least to me, surprisingly blunt: Fixing the renminbi to the dollar is beginning to significantly work to the detriment of Chinese economy. I think there is no question […]