In this Forbes article, Tim Worstall says he agrees with generally available birth control, but questions why health insurance should pay for it. Specifically he says: “But I really cannot see the point of trying to have health care insurance which then covers a multitude of treatments that aren’t really insurable matters, contraception being just […]
The U.S. Election Atlas shows the Michigan county by county results for the general election in 2008. Note that they have inexplicably reversed the normal Red-Blue color coding. Contrast those results with the 2012 Republican primary results. In the Lower Peninsula, the counties that went for Romney in a big way generally went for Obama […]
Mitt Romney won the Michigan Republican primary yesterday by a margin of 41.1% to 37.9%, the remainder going to the rest of the overpopulated field – Herman Cain, Jon Huntsman and others were on the ballot. Romney and Santorum each gained 11 delegates. This Huffpo article has an interactive map showing results by county. The […]
In private communication, Roger Chittum got me thinking about the vehicle component of gasoline consumption. I’m going focus on the gross vehicle numbers, and not get too deeply into the car/truck/SUV product mix detail. Data is from the Department of Energy TRANSPORTATION ENERGY DATA BOOK: EDITION 30—2011. (Warning: 414 page pdf.) According to Table 3-5 […]
I made a mistake in my original post. Graph 4 in that post was based on the wrong data set. As Roger Chittum pointed out in comments, that graph only covers a subset of total gasoline deliveries. This is the correct graph. (Source.) Thanks, Roger! Graph 1 Gasoline Supplied The fall off in gasoline delivery […]
Yesterday, Karl Smith posted on Oil and the Structural Recession. This seems to be one of Karl’s thinking-out-loud posts, with more questions than answers, some convoluted reasoning, and a conclusion that higher gasoline prices are in our future. If I read him right, this will be due to a demand pull. He included this graph […]
Actual markets in the American economy are extremely rare and unusual beasts. An economics of markets ought to be regarded as generally useful as a biology of cephalopods, amid the living world of bones and shells. But, somehow the idealized, metaphoric market is substituted as an analytic mask, laid across a vast variety of economic […]
We’ve already seen in previous installments of this series that since about 1980, I: corporate profits have soared, II: the slice of profits going to finance has soared even more, and III: wages have stagnated. Here we see what corporations have done with all that money. There is a limited selection set: pay taxes, distribute […]
This is another look at the idea I put forth here, that – contra the standard economic idea that consumption depends on wealth – I believe that consumption depends on income. It’s worth stressing that wealth and income are not independent variables. Wealth is the accumulation of unspent income plus returns generated on that wealth […]
Part I showed the money going to corporate profits, not to the salaries of working people. Part II showed that the finance sector has captured an increasing slice of the profit pie. Here is a different look at where the money hasn’t gone. The first graph shows Real GDP/capita and Real Disposable Income/Cap since 1950 […]