Well there is no shortages of insults begin throw around the economic blogs. I guess it is a sign of the times. As New Deal democrat has been posting for a couple of days, we are experiencing a historic unique "bifurcated recovery". So I guess insults are being thrown back and forth across the bifurcation line.
Also, when I say rigorous, I don’t necessarily mean true. But, I thought his comments regarding the log charts vs. not-log charts and the nature of the data that is used was an important consideration in the discussion. It would be interesting to see the specific data sets each is using, the specific charts and logical arguments. I don’t see where the issue of increase or decrease manufacturing has been settled. But, that’s me!
But, I’m definitely not kidding when I say Bonddad is a must read. Today’s charts and comments posted by New Deal are a very important contribution to the discussion about the current state of this very fascinating economic milieu we are experiencing - regardless of which side of the bifurcation one is on. But, again, that’s me!
There is nothing "rigorous" about it! Complete denial about using spurious data, i.e. he did not use the correct graph to look at manufacturing output and then of course insult Scott claiming he must think "all trade is bad"...
Well, I'm sorry but incorrect graphs and then using insult as a defense is not good analysis.
would all this predictable political bullshit over unemployment compensation extensions be necessary if we had a Direct Jobs Program/Job Guarantee Program?
politicons got us in the mess we are in and bail every one out except the unemployed and working class fools like us.Lets let more jobs leave this country with nafta and the likes.What happened to made in america and the middle class???????????????? Thank you us goverment for running this once great country in the ground
I spoke to soon! Even as I was writing over the weekend, Bonddad posted a very rigorous response to EPI. Say what one will about his blog, and I say plenty that is critical especially of New Deal Democrat, Bonddad is still to my mind a must read for those engaged in the US economy.
To make links you can either follow the code example in the user guide or click on the rich text editor and use the icon buttons to fill in with a label and the URL.
I think Scott should have used more graphs. I know what he's talking about with the compounded average but I don't think so many can visual, anywho, Scott is right of course....
I don't know how to link but you do. I wish you had linked me to the EPI piece it took me about of half hour to find it. But, it was time well invested. Most criticism of Bonddad that I have seen has been nuanced almost ideological. This is the first time I've seen him seriously criticized in terms of the factual substance. I was really taken back. Thanks for the hint if not the link.
even with that the premiums for COBRA are often higher than an individual policy. It would seem to me to be cheaper to just add Medicaid as a UI benefit frankly. and yes I am assuming someone is much older. There is a lot of evidence the reason there is institutionalized age discrimination is to keep health insurance costs down, benefit costs down, which should be yet another crime. Same for single mothers.
too lazy to extrapolate them, maybe take it on next Friday with the unemployment report "chase down the missing" graphathon...
but I recall its est. only 48% of the work force is actually eligible.
I know for techies, they are completely screwed, on those contracts, no UI, no severance, no health and there is a huge "permatemp" working population, ya know all corporations want the cheapest they can find and no benefits, no nothing agenda...
then there are the self-employed, who have zip in case of failure and small business, also zippo if failure and even worse, so often they finance their business with credit cards and they are then saddled with massive debt, the kind of debt to start a store or a restaurant level debt.
All of this, the increasing ranks of the poor and I think we also need to hammer home just how low those income levels are (I mean you're dead living in a cardboard box to even qualify for food stamps if you do not have kids) to even get food stamps. ...but the increasing ranks has been going on steadily, esp. after 2001...
America the 3rd world is deserving of a post on it's own.
I hate to sound depressing and this is such scary shit for so many. Also, so much for "pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps" mentality, uh doesn't quite work that way.
On average, only two-thirds of unemployed people received state-provided unemployment checks last year, according to the Labor Department. The rest either exhausted their benefits, fell short of requirements or did not apply.
“You have very large sets of people who have no social protections,” said Randy Albelda, an economist at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. “They are landing in this netherworld.”
When Ms. Eisen and her husband, Jeff, applied for food stamps, they were turned away for having too much monthly income. The cutoff was $1,570 a month — $25 less than her husband’s disability check.
Reforms in the mid-1990s imposed time limits on cash assistance for poor single mothers, a change predicated on the assumption that women would trade welfare checks for paychecks.
Yet as jobs have become harder to get, so has welfare: as of 2006, 44 states cut off anyone with a household income totaling 75 percent of the poverty level — then limited to $1,383 a month for a family of three — according to an analysis by Ms. Albelda.
are a host of HTML examples to learn. But NEVER upload these cartoons, I'm playing a trick here to make sure I don't get in trouble but frankly I wish they would use flash, embedding and then a little ad before viewing so I could share these guilt free.
Point is this site has all sorts of information, tools, including an admin forum to learn how to format posts and comments.
Doesn't the cost of CORBA vary all over the map because it's based on whatever the rates are for a particular employer, which in turn depend on that group's cost experience to the insurer (i.e., if a particular employee group has mostly young people, the rates would be lower, and vice-versa)? That's why employer health insurance is like gold ESPECIALLY for older workers, who get averaged in with the entire group and cannot be excluded. Same age-related problem with individual policies, no? Price an individual policy if you're 60 or over and trying to hang on until Medicare age!
Wish I had the computer skills to post Doonesbury today. It's as if Garry Trudeau, the cartoonist, reads this site (and perhaps he does!). It's about bankers' lack of conscience.
Isn't CORBA expensive as shit? Seriously, I do believe one can buy an individual policy that is much cheaper than those payments on average. I don't have any stats on hand, it just I recall it's absurdly high.
Maybe they should instead made Medicaid be available along with unemployment benefits? A temporary thing.
How long are these corporate Republicans going to stay in office? I keep expecting the conservatives to really start raising hell and maybe even forming a new 3rd party....
it's so clear they are corrupt, even by conservative ideals.
There are some good ideas for retirement protection but one thing that truly bothers me is the desire to reclassify workers from independent contractors.
Now this is rampant, the use of contract law to avoid everything from paying minimum wage to massive stiffing of pay for work performed...
it really is a major problem, but that said...
this really hurts professionals, esp. tech professionals.
On that score they need to loosen these rules and that's because due to fear, a host of 3rd parties popped up as contract houses, headhunters and all they do is act at IRS buffers in case of claim that ind. contractor is an employee! So, this destroys small groups and individuals to be in the consulting business, with a host of contract houses basically taking these guys pay..
I mean how absurd to classify construction or janitors or restaurant workers as contractors...at the same time, hitting up professional services is the opposite effect.
Also, they refuse to deal with trade, offshore outsourcing and a host of other issues for the middle class. It's really a glorified union wish list, which is fine, unions have a tendency to raise labor conditions for everybody...
but at the same time, unions, such as the situation with ind. contractor status, just are not flexible or haven't created enough flexibility for a lot of the professional fields.
That said, most on the list really is pretty good (minus the odds on attack against technical professionals, always the first meat to be thrown to the corporate lions!), although I think more focus on enabling work at home, telecommute would be good, useful for disabled people, people with kids and so on.
The last part of your comment raises the question of whether simply outlawing "shorting" might go a long way in minimizing a lot of these harmful shenanigans. Does shorting serve any beneficial function to society?
In general, if I am understanding this correctly, the collapse of the Bretton Woods system introduced a degree of flux to currency exchange rates that allows various gaming that can be used to manipulate the conditions of labor markets. This would explain the decoupling of wages and productivity in 1972/73. I am not sure exactly what these games are, nor the chain reaction by which they lead to the "race to the bottom" for workers. Is there some way in which the end of Bretton Woods facilitates outsourcing (by way of a more free flow of capital?)?
Also, your comment points out that a decent amount of the upward flow of wealth is attributable simply to skimming wealth by the financial industry itself. I assume financial deregulation plays into this aside from the Bretton Woods issue (or also related?) But it seems like a big part of the problem must also be due to a decrease in bargaining power of labor vs capital. This is something the specific mechanisms of which I wish I better understood. I assume corporate lobbyist written trade deals are a big factor. Are these shitty-for-worker trade deals enabled in some way by the death of Bretton Woods?
GRETCHEN MORGENSON in the New York Times is almost channeling the above post, with added detail (trust me, she did not channel this, I'm more surprised the financial press and blogs were not on fire with this latest, screaming in unison, or why we do not have 2 million people marching on D.C. over the lack of derivatives reform....)
Which leads to another question, how do you get the general public to realize these things are equivalent to a neutron bomb and this is really financial terrorism against the nation?
This insistence that you mustn’t slow the pace of innovation is just childish,” Mr. Mayer said. “Innovation has now cost us $7 trillion,” he added, referring to the loss in household wealth that has resulted from the crisis. “That’s a pretty high price to pay for innovation.
I can read junk every day of the week but why would I bother? I'm much more busy trying to learn and read other sites, many listed here. VoxEU is also good and these are the ones who really dig into economic theory...
Why would I waste my time? I just noticed this time they managed to bring down the ire of a host of economists, heavily focused on manufacturing, including EPI via that HuffPo piece, which gave me a chuckle.
Well there is no shortages of insults begin throw around the economic blogs. I guess it is a sign of the times. As New Deal democrat has been posting for a couple of days, we are experiencing a historic unique "bifurcated recovery". So I guess insults are being thrown back and forth across the bifurcation line.
Also, when I say rigorous, I don’t necessarily mean true. But, I thought his comments regarding the log charts vs. not-log charts and the nature of the data that is used was an important consideration in the discussion. It would be interesting to see the specific data sets each is using, the specific charts and logical arguments. I don’t see where the issue of increase or decrease manufacturing has been settled. But, that’s me!
But, I’m definitely not kidding when I say Bonddad is a must read. Today’s charts and comments posted by New Deal are a very important contribution to the discussion about the current state of this very fascinating economic milieu we are experiencing - regardless of which side of the bifurcation one is on. But, again, that’s me!
There is nothing "rigorous" about it! Complete denial about using spurious data, i.e. he did not use the correct graph to look at manufacturing output and then of course insult Scott claiming he must think "all trade is bad"...
Well, I'm sorry but incorrect graphs and then using insult as a defense is not good analysis.
would all this predictable political bullshit over unemployment compensation extensions be necessary if we had a Direct Jobs Program/Job Guarantee Program?
Hell no.
RebelCapitalist.com - Financial Information for the Rest of Us.
politicons got us in the mess we are in and bail every one out except the unemployed and working class fools like us.Lets let more jobs leave this country with nafta and the likes.What happened to made in america and the middle class???????????????? Thank you us goverment for running this once great country in the ground
I spoke to soon! Even as I was writing over the weekend, Bonddad posted a very rigorous response to EPI. Say what one will about his blog, and I say plenty that is critical especially of New Deal Democrat, Bonddad is still to my mind a must read for those engaged in the US economy.
link.
To make links you can either follow the code example in the user guide or click on the rich text editor and use the icon buttons to fill in with a label and the URL.
I think Scott should have used more graphs. I know what he's talking about with the compounded average but I don't think so many can visual, anywho, Scott is right of course....
I don't know how to link but you do. I wish you had linked me to the EPI piece it took me about of half hour to find it. But, it was time well invested. Most criticism of Bonddad that I have seen has been nuanced almost ideological. This is the first time I've seen him seriously criticized in terms of the factual substance. I was really taken back. Thanks for the hint if not the link.
even with that the premiums for COBRA are often higher than an individual policy. It would seem to me to be cheaper to just add Medicaid as a UI benefit frankly. and yes I am assuming someone is much older. There is a lot of evidence the reason there is institutionalized age discrimination is to keep health insurance costs down, benefit costs down, which should be yet another crime. Same for single mothers.
too lazy to extrapolate them, maybe take it on next Friday with the unemployment report "chase down the missing" graphathon...
but I recall its est. only 48% of the work force is actually eligible.
I know for techies, they are completely screwed, on those contracts, no UI, no severance, no health and there is a huge "permatemp" working population, ya know all corporations want the cheapest they can find and no benefits, no nothing agenda...
then there are the self-employed, who have zip in case of failure and small business, also zippo if failure and even worse, so often they finance their business with credit cards and they are then saddled with massive debt, the kind of debt to start a store or a restaurant level debt.
All of this, the increasing ranks of the poor and I think we also need to hammer home just how low those income levels are (I mean you're dead living in a cardboard box to even qualify for food stamps if you do not have kids) to even get food stamps. ...but the increasing ranks has been going on steadily, esp. after 2001...
America the 3rd world is deserving of a post on it's own.
I hate to sound depressing and this is such scary shit for so many. Also, so much for "pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps" mentality, uh doesn't quite work that way.
This article was interesting, if depressing.
are a host of HTML examples to learn. But NEVER upload these cartoons, I'm playing a trick here to make sure I don't get in trouble but frankly I wish they would use flash, embedding and then a little ad before viewing so I could share these guilt free.
Point is this site has all sorts of information, tools, including an admin forum to learn how to format posts and comments.
Doesn't the cost of CORBA vary all over the map because it's based on whatever the rates are for a particular employer, which in turn depend on that group's cost experience to the insurer (i.e., if a particular employee group has mostly young people, the rates would be lower, and vice-versa)? That's why employer health insurance is like gold ESPECIALLY for older workers, who get averaged in with the entire group and cannot be excluded. Same age-related problem with individual policies, no? Price an individual policy if you're 60 or over and trying to hang on until Medicare age!
Wish I had the computer skills to post Doonesbury today. It's as if Garry Trudeau, the cartoonist, reads this site (and perhaps he does!). It's about bankers' lack of conscience.
Isn't CORBA expensive as shit? Seriously, I do believe one can buy an individual policy that is much cheaper than those payments on average. I don't have any stats on hand, it just I recall it's absurdly high.
Maybe they should instead made Medicaid be available along with unemployment benefits? A temporary thing.
How long are these corporate Republicans going to stay in office? I keep expecting the conservatives to really start raising hell and maybe even forming a new 3rd party....
it's so clear they are corrupt, even by conservative ideals.
This report was released last Friday.
There are some good ideas for retirement protection but one thing that truly bothers me is the desire to reclassify workers from independent contractors.
Now this is rampant, the use of contract law to avoid everything from paying minimum wage to massive stiffing of pay for work performed...
it really is a major problem, but that said...
this really hurts professionals, esp. tech professionals.
On that score they need to loosen these rules and that's because due to fear, a host of 3rd parties popped up as contract houses, headhunters and all they do is act at IRS buffers in case of claim that ind. contractor is an employee! So, this destroys small groups and individuals to be in the consulting business, with a host of contract houses basically taking these guys pay..
I mean how absurd to classify construction or janitors or restaurant workers as contractors...at the same time, hitting up professional services is the opposite effect.
Also, they refuse to deal with trade, offshore outsourcing and a host of other issues for the middle class. It's really a glorified union wish list, which is fine, unions have a tendency to raise labor conditions for everybody...
but at the same time, unions, such as the situation with ind. contractor status, just are not flexible or haven't created enough flexibility for a lot of the professional fields.
That said, most on the list really is pretty good (minus the odds on attack against technical professionals, always the first meat to be thrown to the corporate lions!), although I think more focus on enabling work at home, telecommute would be good, useful for disabled people, people with kids and so on.
The last part of your comment raises the question of whether simply outlawing "shorting" might go a long way in minimizing a lot of these harmful shenanigans. Does shorting serve any beneficial function to society?
In general, if I am understanding this correctly, the collapse of the Bretton Woods system introduced a degree of flux to currency exchange rates that allows various gaming that can be used to manipulate the conditions of labor markets. This would explain the decoupling of wages and productivity in 1972/73. I am not sure exactly what these games are, nor the chain reaction by which they lead to the "race to the bottom" for workers. Is there some way in which the end of Bretton Woods facilitates outsourcing (by way of a more free flow of capital?)?
Also, your comment points out that a decent amount of the upward flow of wealth is attributable simply to skimming wealth by the financial industry itself. I assume financial deregulation plays into this aside from the Bretton Woods issue (or also related?) But it seems like a big part of the problem must also be due to a decrease in bargaining power of labor vs capital. This is something the specific mechanisms of which I wish I better understood. I assume corporate lobbyist written trade deals are a big factor. Are these shitty-for-worker trade deals enabled in some way by the death of Bretton Woods?
miasmo.com
GRETCHEN MORGENSON in the New York Times is almost channeling the above post, with added detail (trust me, she did not channel this, I'm more surprised the financial press and blogs were not on fire with this latest, screaming in unison, or why we do not have 2 million people marching on D.C. over the lack of derivatives reform....)
Which leads to another question, how do you get the general public to realize these things are equivalent to a neutron bomb and this is really financial terrorism against the nation?
In this latest New York Times Article, she has some great quotes by Martin Mayer:
which is rare, but he found a couple of great ones in the past week.
I can read junk every day of the week but why would I bother? I'm much more busy trying to learn and read other sites, many listed here. VoxEU is also good and these are the ones who really dig into economic theory...
Why would I waste my time? I just noticed this time they managed to bring down the ire of a host of economists, heavily focused on manufacturing, including EPI via that HuffPo piece, which gave me a chuckle.
Pages