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Looks like the upper echelon's don't need tax reform...unless it's a flat tax type that reduces their effective tax rate, huh?

I'm referring to Romney's 2010 13% tax bill,and expected 15% for 2011.... on $6.2  million tax bill on $42.5 million in earnings for both years or an average of 14.5% in federal tax. 

...
2012-01-06T16:27:04Z

I was listening to a news broadcast tonight and noted the copious use of the term "app" and "apps" as they apply to those computer "applications" you can download to your iphone, ipad, computer, etc.  The thought occurred to me that anybody under about 20 might not even know that the term "app" is a contraction of the ...

2012-01-06T16:31:11Z

Is there any reason to suspect or believe that the composite market (private enterprise) is any better than a gov't in allocation of resources toward some goal / objective?

Since people are people, and the composite market is simply the mean of a composite of people's predictions / beliefs about a future condition (economic future ...

2012-01-07T16:02:08Z

Of the 200k employment gains in Dec, over 80% were in Services (164k/200k), and that was only 1k more than the Services gain in Dec last year... basically no difference in Dec's gains in services compared to a year ago.   This is typical of December's employment gains due to holiday shopping season.  ...

2012-01-15T16:19:48Z
This is a continuation of my note A Thought to Ponder -- Private Enterprise v. Gov't .
 
In that note I offered that private enterpirse based markets can be no better or worse than gov't committees in making decisions regards resource allocation.  I showed that the uncertainty of in magnitude of pricing ...
2012-01-15T16:20:49Z
I was able to get a rough, but decent handle on the uncertainty of the reported unemployment numbers.  The uncertainty is based on the combination of BLS reported data and an independant measure of unemployment by Gallop.. done monthly.  ...
2012-01-15T16:22:53Z
Saw an article in today's San Jose Mecury News about Intel's 2012 Science Talent Search Semi-Finalists which caught my attention ---
 
The attention grabber was noticing that in the list of 29 semi-finalists from the Bay Area, I could only identify 2-3 with Western European names... say 10%, and the reason this caught my ...
2012-01-15T16:23:41Z
I can't believe anybody is really surprised by this or that it wasn't fully expected by anybody paying even the slightest bit of attention to anything but the headline hype over the ...
2012-01-15T16:26:00Z
I've been doing some work looking into EV's again... though I'm not done yet, one of the outcomes of analysis is that there's virtually no net gain in GHG's reduction by shifting to EV's from Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) vehicles.  Though this might be a bit surprising to you, the tradeoff is only in the form of energy consumed ...
2012-01-15T16:26:19Z
I came across an article on how we think --- the basis and ...
2012-01-15T16:27:47Z
Roubini and Stiglitz each provide independant assessments of US's headwinds going into, through 2012, and beyond.
 
2012-01-15T16:28:28Z
Demand for 10 Yr US Treasury Bonds has increased a bit dramatically since this time last year.  Rates since last August have been pretty range bound, but even more-so since November to present.... averaging just under par (coupon rate = 2.00%) value since then (1.9904%).  The trendsince Nov 1 ...
2012-01-15T16:29:59Z

From Mark Thoma in Economist's View today, writing of the observation that some well known and accomplished economists use selective economics to support their ideological agenda ...

2012-01-15T16:32:01Z
In my prior notes I showed that the rate of growth in median family incomes relative to GDP / capita growth was reduced to a rate of 85% of what it had been for the post-war years to '79.  The question then becomes what caused the 15% reduction in share of economic growth by the median family's income relative to GDP growth per ...
2012-01-15T16:35:37Z
The following chart from Krugman's blog today illustrates the reduction in median family income growth v. GDP per Capita 1979-2005 compared to the period 1947 - 1979. ...
2012-01-15T16:38:29Z
This is another treatise on the issues related to labor & capital trade-offs as they apply in the current global environent.  I wrote this back in November and forgot to send it then.  The content of this note though focused on a different issue, is similar in its conclusions to the note I sent earlier today on the ...
2012-01-17T15:57:16Z

Globally, economic interdependencies are eroding the concept of nation's "sovereignty". 

This is simply a continuation of man's social evolution --- small tribes, congregating to larger tribes with more territory, then regional agglomerations, followed by small civilizations growing from harnessing agricultural ...

2012-01-19T16:09:07Z
The subject is academically referred to as Intergenerational [Economic] Mobility.

High intergenerational mobility means a high positive relationship between parent's income and adult children's income.
 
The greater the intergenerational mobility the less the next generation's income depends on opportunities than on ...

2012-01-19T16:12:49Z
I put this together from this web-site's data .  I guess I could have gone to the gov. site, but just happened on this first. Dec's data is projected from the Year to ...
2012-01-19T16:13:03Z
It turns out that 3Q's robust nominal growth at over 5% (annualized) shown in my prior note on the subject wasn't really so robust at all. 
 
In real terms 3Q's growth turned out to be only 1.8%!  That was still better than 2Q's though which came in at 1.3% in ...
2012-01-19T16:14:12Z
The following chart displays maximum annual capital gains tax rate since 1954.  I was curious about what the time averaged rate has been from '54 until the Bush Tax cuts most recent... i.e. 1954 thru 2002.  I excluded the Bush tax cuts period because I consider those upper level cuts illigitimate, not to mention the fact that ...
2012-01-20T14:35:45Z
Link to BEA chart showing quarterly GDP changes on real annualized basis.  You'll notice 2011 to date is in the relative mud levels since the dive in 2009 and the improvements in 2010.  2011 worse than 2010.... so like the economics history said the improved GDP following the dive in 2009 was due to the preverbial but ...
2012-01-22T02:47:50Z
I don't know whether this is legit or not but I used the real GDP quarterly percent changes for Personal Consumption Expenditure cumulative change (products of % changes each qrter) since 2007 Q4 to see where we are now (2011 Q3) with respect to 2007 Q4 levels (2007 Q4 set to 0).   Basically, I set Q4 2007 as my reference ...
2012-01-22T03:25:10Z
The S.Court today negated the Federal District Court's redistricting map, telling that court they must more fully use the Texas Legislators guidance in redrawing Texas's legislative districts.  This ruling effectively forces the District Court to give more weight to the Legislators guidance which branch has heavily ...
2012-01-24T18:10:04Z

I won't link to that blog entry directly (since it eats into my free 20 entries/mo.into NYT), but you can get there without using any free entries to NYT by clicking on "go to Krugman's blog" instead of clicking on any of the individual blog entries... use this link..

Anyway, the ...

2012-01-24T18:24:47Z

Kudlow in his last paragraph of blog entry entitled "GOP Needs a Bolder Growth Message":

...
2012-01-24T18:32:02Z

I'm referring to the following chart:

 

You'll note that the divergence begins during the period where GDP was flat ... which is the period in the late '70's where interest rates were increased to tame inflation.  During that period the median family income fell wrt per capital GDP.  When the economy recovered, median ...

2012-01-24T18:42:44Z

This is what's meant by "trickle-down" economics... obviously a rising tide doesn't lift all boats by the magnitude of tidal rise though... the middle 5th only got 1/3rd that of the top 5th... the 2nd 5th less than 1/4, and the bottom 5th just  1/7th.  "Trickle' overstates what comes down though... more like a "slow drip"...

2012-02-14T15:59:21Z

This write-up on Hungary's anti-democratic constitution  illustrates how easy it is for a parliamentary body (or in US case, a congressional body such as our Senate & House) to rewrite the parliamentary rules which can virtually change things overnight.  In the US a constitutional amendment requires 2/3's of states to ...

2012-02-20T16:18:13Z

The chart shown in Krugman's blog is originally from this source this source. The chart shows:

Inflation-adjusted GDP per capita and median family income from 1947 (the earliest year for which the income data are available) to 2007. To facilitate comparison of the over-time trends, each is indexed to its 1973 level. 

...