i've covered this report for years while almost no one else does (just McBride and a few housing sites)...this situation should be a major issue, but it somehow stays under the radar...
4 years out, that's a long time to live rent free, assuming you can pay utilities still, but there are also property taxes, sometimes so outrageous people cannot afford even those.
That slip of the tongue from Walker is no slip. As far as I know, he's destroyed the WI economy, had even more mass exodus of manufacturing jobs, decimating the area, hasn't lowered taxes in that state (they tax everywhere), and people are absolutely desperate. Might even do a WI economic showcase to show the impact of tea party politics.
You say "A political party that supports raising taxes to solve all problems is better than the Republican party is absolutely asinine."
I say a political party that favors taxing the poor a greater percentage of their income than the rich is evil. I never said raising taxes (on the very rich) would solve all our problems. Higher wages would help too. And if you only vote for Republicans, then I can only assume that 1) You are very wealthy, or 2) You're not very wealthy and always vote against your own best interests, or 3) the issues of abortion and birth control are your prime concerns.
You harp on the Republicans, but which party supports lower taxes and reduced spending? Answer: Republicans. I admit, Republicans, like the Democrats are evil, but to say that a political party that supports raising taxes to solve all problems is better than the Republican party is absolutely asinine. As long as my choice is between only these two parties, I'll vote for Republicans by a landslide. Not until the Democrat party is wiped from the face of this earth will I gladly stop voting for Republicans.
The two articles below are related: Republicans want to provide tax cuts for their rich friends; but they also say we need to balance the budget. So they want to cut the safety net, steal pensions and screw workers to accomplish this.
The OLD Marco Rubio and Mike Lee tax plan wanted to cut the top rate from 39.6 to "only" 35 percent [on regular wages], and use the money that could have gone into cutting it even further to expand the Child Tax Credit from $1,000 to $3,500 instead. Now that credit would only be refundable against payroll and income taxes—so if you didn't owe any, you wouldn't get any help—which is why most of its benefits would go to the middle and upper-middle classes. The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center estimates that, altogether, this plan would raise after-tax incomes 1 percent for the bottom 40 percent, around 2.4 percent for the next 50, 2.8 percent for the top 1, and 3.8 percent for the top 0.1. That adds up to a lot of red ink, though: $2.4 trillion more in deficits over the next decade, to be exact.
The NEW Marco Rubio and Mike Lee tax plan would cut capital gains taxes from 23.8 percent to zero, dividend taxes from 23.8 percent to zero, and the estate tax from 40 percent to zero. That's a lot of zeroes. Not only that, but it would also cut the corporate tax rate from 35 to 25 percent, stop taxing overseas earnings, and allow businesses to deduct all their expenses at once. Nobody's run the numbers yet, but it's more than safe to say that most of these new tax cuts would go to the top 1 percent. Just think about this. The Tax Policy Center says that getting rid of all investment taxes would, on average, give someone in the middle 40 to 60 percent a $66 tax cut—don't spend it all in one place!—while the top 1 percent would get $61,891 and the top 0.1 percent would get $401,554. (link)
"The disproportionate pay of bankers continues to lure talent away from areas that create more and better jobs for the population as a whole ... Part of the problem with the rise of finance is that it encourages the culture of shareholder value over all else. That means CEOs focus more on buoying stock prices rather than making the best long-term decisions. The effects can be seen in the fact that since the 1980s, share buybacks and dividend payments have increased in direct proportion to a decrease in productive capital investment ... the low interest rates that have prevailed particularly since the 2008 crisis have sped up the trend as firms actually borrow money at lower rates to do more buybacks, rather than invest in the real economy ... In fact, business investment dropped 20% since 2008, as almost all borrowing went back to investors in the form of such payments.
STUDY: Why does financial sector growth crowd out real economic growth?
by Stephen G Cecchetti and Enisse Kharroubi
Working Papers No 490 (February 2015) https://www.bis.org/publ/work490.htm
You keep mentioning banned words on the site. ;) Yeah, no kidding on the Fed making sure the super rich become even richer. They are making sure that party ain't gonna crash too.
Pundits were out in force celebrating the six-year anniversary of the bull market in stocks. Notably, no one was talking about the fact that the run-up in stock prices has coincided with a six-year zero interest-rate policy by the Federal Reserve, making the stock market a dandy casino to borrow low on margin and speculate high on risk; or, in the case of corporations, to issue tons of new debt and buy back their own stock.
CBO requests appropriations of $47.3 million for fiscal year 2016.
About one-quarter of the requested increase, roughly $440,000, would fund three new full-time-equivalent positions that would be devoted to analyzing the economic effects of federal tax and spending policies (including conducting "dynamic analysis" of certain legislation pursuant to a new House rule) and health care issues.
The remaining $1.1 million increase would be devoted to ongoing operations—the result of an increase of nearly $1.7 million in pay and benefits, which would be partly offset by a decrease of about $550,000 in nonpay expenditures.
Three major consumer goods have dramatically improved the life of middle America over the last 100 years.The automobile plus its infrastructure plus the TV were easily measured by GDP. The auto increase employment dramatically and the TV increased employment some but production techniques cost dropped dramatically as did contribution to GDP and employment per unit of enjoyment. Then came the cell/smart phones. Consumer enjoyment was about as large as vehicles and TV's but cost was minimal and so was the increase in GDP and employment.
How do you measure the GDP of a smart phone. Its a phone, a TV, a tape recorder, a camera, a movie camera, a library.... Add the cost of said items in 1950's and 60's prices to today's GDP. How much income did it take to buy these items 50 years ago during the glory days of GDP and income growth. Now add the drop in cost phone call across the country to income. If you send a picture you need add the cost to GDP and income. Now adjust for quality. Color TV, Now estimate the value of all this being portable. The middle class has a lot more income than is being measured.
Major scientific accomplishments such as aspirin, penicillin and curing childhood diseases pile up and contribute to wellbeing but GDP and employment are minimally affected. Soon to come gene therapy. How can you measure making a blind person see?
there's probably a margin of error in these as great as that in a Census construction series...and of course, January is just one month in the quarter...but i wanted to walk through these reports just to see what it would take to do it...
The point is that Keynes said that the adjustment of I and S is not done by the rate of interest (that was the marginalist or neoclassical school's loanable funds theory of interest of Wicksell and Marshall, not classical school, Smith and Ricardo), but by variations of income. Even if the MPC is one you still have a multiplier, since workers' income is less than total income. Kalecki's version of the Principle of Effective Demand does not require the psychological law, that the MPC is between 0 and 1. And that would hardly make the whole thing revolutionary. By the way, the important point is causality and adjusting mechanism. In the mainstream neoclassical story Investment adjusts to full employment savings, since the rate of interest does the job. In Keynes, investment determines savings, since as spending (investment) increases, income goes up and so does savings. So investment determines savings and the level might not be one at which there is full employment of capital or labor.
Keynes point was that even with price flexibility (any price, including real wages and interest rates) the system would not go to full employment. For that you must go the arguments of chapter 19 of the General Theory. So even if you have unemployment, and that would, according to Keynes, reduce the real value of money and reduce the rate of interest and stimulate investment (the Keynes' effect), he suggested that lower prices would also lead to an increase in the real value of debt, and if investors where indebted, to a collapse of investment and output. This is known as the debt-deflation effect. The discussion of the multiplier that you make is very simplistic, in all fairness. There are problems with Keynes' theory, but they actually stem from the mainstream discussion of investment that he accepts in his book. In particular, the evidence on investment is well established and is explained by something called the accelerator. Firms buy machines in order to keep capacity adjusted to growing demand, so investment is not autonomous spending, which is the central force behind the multiplier and the determination of output and employment. Also, investment is impervious to changes in the rate of interest.
I recommend you check first a good manual, or read Kalecki, which was an engineer and developed Keynes ideas at the same time independently. For the more advanced problems I suggested you may read this and the references at the end https://www.academia.edu/10839034/Keynes_after_Sraffa_and_Kaldor I think the key book is still Amadeo cited in my references.
Best of luck.
Matías
Way to go rjs! Yeah, so Q1 2015 is lookin' like Q1 2014 redux, so glad you're doing this, offline I have some equations and I've posted them on here in some of the posts a couple of years ago to help out.
I've done them but they take time, so good for you. That's the kind of information people really want from these overviews, not what is already said by the BEA/Census/BLS.
i was bored with just reporting the numbers so i decided to try to figure out how last weeks reports would impact GDP...it was more work than i expected, and i probably have as large a margin of error as the census housing reports, but at least it was a different take than the usual...
Most Americans have no [political] influence at all. That’s the conclusion of Professors Martin Gilens of Princeton and Benjamin Page of Northwestern University, who analyzed 1,799 policy issues — and found that “the preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”
Instead, American lawmakers respond to the demands of wealthy individuals (typically corporate executives and Wall Street moguls) and of big corporations – those with the most lobbying prowess and deepest pockets to bankroll campaigns.
The second fact is most big American corporations have no particular allegiance to America. They don’t want Americans to have better wages. Their only allegiance and responsibility to their shareholders — which often requires lower wages to fuel larger profits and higher share prices.
* That's one reason why they're called "multinational" corporations. They are money generators without borders, with people from different countries sitting on each others board of directors, and often sitting on multiple boards of directors — owning stock in one company that usually benefits other companies.
The global corporate web has no patriotic duty to any one country, their executives' only duty is to themselves and each other. They are more like collaborators than they are competitors.
When they are not making stock buybacks, they spend billions in mergers and acquisitions. It's really one huge global corporate machine: they are "people" — but real people (CEOs and other corporate execs) come and go, whereas "The Machine" (the corporation) lives on in immortality in one form or another.
i've covered this report for years while almost no one else does (just McBride and a few housing sites)...this situation should be a major issue, but it somehow stays under the radar...
4 years out, that's a long time to live rent free, assuming you can pay utilities still, but there are also property taxes, sometimes so outrageous people cannot afford even those.
Seems we have slow down, sluggish reports everywhere except our great divorced from the real economy Wall Street.
They all are busy timing the Fed interest rate rise but I wonder if they will considering.
That slip of the tongue from Walker is no slip. As far as I know, he's destroyed the WI economy, had even more mass exodus of manufacturing jobs, decimating the area, hasn't lowered taxes in that state (they tax everywhere), and people are absolutely desperate. Might even do a WI economic showcase to show the impact of tea party politics.
You say "A political party that supports raising taxes to solve all problems is better than the Republican party is absolutely asinine."
I say a political party that favors taxing the poor a greater percentage of their income than the rich is evil. I never said raising taxes (on the very rich) would solve all our problems. Higher wages would help too. And if you only vote for Republicans, then I can only assume that 1) You are very wealthy, or 2) You're not very wealthy and always vote against your own best interests, or 3) the issues of abortion and birth control are your prime concerns.
You harp on the Republicans, but which party supports lower taxes and reduced spending? Answer: Republicans. I admit, Republicans, like the Democrats are evil, but to say that a political party that supports raising taxes to solve all problems is better than the Republican party is absolutely asinine. As long as my choice is between only these two parties, I'll vote for Republicans by a landslide. Not until the Democrat party is wiped from the face of this earth will I gladly stop voting for Republicans.
The two articles below are related: Republicans want to provide tax cuts for their rich friends; but they also say we need to balance the budget. So they want to cut the safety net, steal pensions and screw workers to accomplish this.
Washington Post: The new Republican tax plan is just the Bush tax cuts on steroids
David Cay Johnston: Don’t be duped by misleading economic terms. Pension contributions aren’t gifts, and the free market doesn’t exist.
TIME:
"The disproportionate pay of bankers continues to lure talent away from areas that create more and better jobs for the population as a whole ... Part of the problem with the rise of finance is that it encourages the culture of shareholder value over all else. That means CEOs focus more on buoying stock prices rather than making the best long-term decisions. The effects can be seen in the fact that since the 1980s, share buybacks and dividend payments have increased in direct proportion to a decrease in productive capital investment ... the low interest rates that have prevailed particularly since the 2008 crisis have sped up the trend as firms actually borrow money at lower rates to do more buybacks, rather than invest in the real economy ... In fact, business investment dropped 20% since 2008, as almost all borrowing went back to investors in the form of such payments.
http://time.com/3736713/american-finance-problem/
STUDY: Why does financial sector growth crowd out real economic growth?
by Stephen G Cecchetti and Enisse Kharroubi
Working Papers No 490 (February 2015)
https://www.bis.org/publ/work490.htm
You keep mentioning banned words on the site. ;) Yeah, no kidding on the Fed making sure the super rich become even richer. They are making sure that party ain't gonna crash too.
Wall Street on Parade (March 10, 2015)
Pundits were out in force celebrating the six-year anniversary of the bull market in stocks. Notably, no one was talking about the fact that the run-up in stock prices has coincided with a six-year zero interest-rate policy by the Federal Reserve, making the stock market a dandy casino to borrow low on margin and speculate high on risk; or, in the case of corporations, to issue tons of new debt and buy back their own stock.
http://wallstreetonparade.com/2015/03/a-6-year-bull-market-in-stocks-or-...
CBO requests appropriations of $47.3 million for fiscal year 2016.
About one-quarter of the requested increase, roughly $440,000, would fund three new full-time-equivalent positions that would be devoted to analyzing the economic effects of federal tax and spending policies (including conducting "dynamic analysis" of certain legislation pursuant to a new House rule) and health care issues.
The remaining $1.1 million increase would be devoted to ongoing operations—the result of an increase of nearly $1.7 million in pay and benefits, which would be partly offset by a decrease of about $550,000 in nonpay expenditures.
http://www.cbo.gov/publication/50002
Three major consumer goods have dramatically improved the life of middle America over the last 100 years.The automobile plus its infrastructure plus the TV were easily measured by GDP. The auto increase employment dramatically and the TV increased employment some but production techniques cost dropped dramatically as did contribution to GDP and employment per unit of enjoyment. Then came the cell/smart phones. Consumer enjoyment was about as large as vehicles and TV's but cost was minimal and so was the increase in GDP and employment.
How do you measure the GDP of a smart phone. Its a phone, a TV, a tape recorder, a camera, a movie camera, a library.... Add the cost of said items in 1950's and 60's prices to today's GDP. How much income did it take to buy these items 50 years ago during the glory days of GDP and income growth. Now add the drop in cost phone call across the country to income. If you send a picture you need add the cost to GDP and income. Now adjust for quality. Color TV, Now estimate the value of all this being portable. The middle class has a lot more income than is being measured.
Major scientific accomplishments such as aspirin, penicillin and curing childhood diseases pile up and contribute to wellbeing but GDP and employment are minimally affected. Soon to come gene therapy. How can you measure making a blind person see?
there's probably a margin of error in these as great as that in a Census construction series...and of course, January is just one month in the quarter...but i wanted to walk through these reports just to see what it would take to do it...
The point is that Keynes said that the adjustment of I and S is not done by the rate of interest (that was the marginalist or neoclassical school's loanable funds theory of interest of Wicksell and Marshall, not classical school, Smith and Ricardo), but by variations of income. Even if the MPC is one you still have a multiplier, since workers' income is less than total income. Kalecki's version of the Principle of Effective Demand does not require the psychological law, that the MPC is between 0 and 1. And that would hardly make the whole thing revolutionary. By the way, the important point is causality and adjusting mechanism. In the mainstream neoclassical story Investment adjusts to full employment savings, since the rate of interest does the job. In Keynes, investment determines savings, since as spending (investment) increases, income goes up and so does savings. So investment determines savings and the level might not be one at which there is full employment of capital or labor.
Keynes point was that even with price flexibility (any price, including real wages and interest rates) the system would not go to full employment. For that you must go the arguments of chapter 19 of the General Theory. So even if you have unemployment, and that would, according to Keynes, reduce the real value of money and reduce the rate of interest and stimulate investment (the Keynes' effect), he suggested that lower prices would also lead to an increase in the real value of debt, and if investors where indebted, to a collapse of investment and output. This is known as the debt-deflation effect. The discussion of the multiplier that you make is very simplistic, in all fairness. There are problems with Keynes' theory, but they actually stem from the mainstream discussion of investment that he accepts in his book. In particular, the evidence on investment is well established and is explained by something called the accelerator. Firms buy machines in order to keep capacity adjusted to growing demand, so investment is not autonomous spending, which is the central force behind the multiplier and the determination of output and employment. Also, investment is impervious to changes in the rate of interest.
I recommend you check first a good manual, or read Kalecki, which was an engineer and developed Keynes ideas at the same time independently. For the more advanced problems I suggested you may read this and the references at the end https://www.academia.edu/10839034/Keynes_after_Sraffa_and_Kaldor I think the key book is still Amadeo cited in my references.
Best of luck.
Matías
Matías Vernengo
http://nakedkeynesianism.blogspot.com/
Way to go rjs! Yeah, so Q1 2015 is lookin' like Q1 2014 redux, so glad you're doing this, offline I have some equations and I've posted them on here in some of the posts a couple of years ago to help out.
Jan. 22, 2015 --- Qualcomm Gives Top Executives $95 Million in Stock Grants
http://www.wsj.com/articles/qualcomm-grants-more-stock-to-retain-top-exe...
March 9, 2015 --- Qualcomm Plans $15 Billion Stock Buyback, Hikes Dividend
http://www.forbes.com/sites/laurengensler/2015/03/09/qualcomm-plans-15b-...
Meanwhile, Hewlett-Packard will acquire the networking company Aruba Networks in a deal valued at $2.7 billion.
When people say neoliberalism was good for growth, they tend to be looking at the stock market, not GDP or wages.
I've done them but they take time, so good for you. That's the kind of information people really want from these overviews, not what is already said by the BEA/Census/BLS.
i was bored with just reporting the numbers so i decided to try to figure out how last weeks reports would impact GDP...it was more work than i expected, and i probably have as large a margin of error as the census housing reports, but at least it was a different take than the usual...
I caught that this was all energy but adding in the deflationary aspects plus durable is nice, thx.
Most Americans have no [political] influence at all. That’s the conclusion of Professors Martin Gilens of Princeton and Benjamin Page of Northwestern University, who analyzed 1,799 policy issues — and found that “the preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”
Instead, American lawmakers respond to the demands of wealthy individuals (typically corporate executives and Wall Street moguls) and of big corporations – those with the most lobbying prowess and deepest pockets to bankroll campaigns.
The second fact is most big American corporations have no particular allegiance to America. They don’t want Americans to have better wages. Their only allegiance and responsibility to their shareholders — which often requires lower wages to fuel larger profits and higher share prices.
http://robertreich.org/post/113130324775
* That's one reason why they're called "multinational" corporations. They are money generators without borders, with people from different countries sitting on each others board of directors, and often sitting on multiple boards of directors — owning stock in one company that usually benefits other companies.
The global corporate web has no patriotic duty to any one country, their executives' only duty is to themselves and each other. They are more like collaborators than they are competitors.
When they are not making stock buybacks, they spend billions in mergers and acquisitions. It's really one huge global corporate machine: they are "people" — but real people (CEOs and other corporate execs) come and go, whereas "The Machine" (the corporation) lives on in immortality in one form or another.
Pages