economics Archives - Page 11 of 50 - Stable Genius Liberal

How Tea Party tax cuts are turning Kansas into a smoking ruin

The state’s rainy-day fund is dwindling to zero. Month after month, revenue comes in even lower than fiscal officials’ most dire expectations. In the rest of the country, school budgets are finally beginning to recover from the toll of the last recession; in Kansas, they’re still falling. Healthcare, assistance for the poor, courts, and other state services are being eviscerated.

The cynic in me thinks that’s the result they want. To cut taxes on the wealthy and services for the poor and blame the poor economy on immigrants and Obama.

Joblessness not due to skills gap, experts say

The starting wage in manufacturing in the seven-county Pittsburgh region fell from $19,855 in the beginning of 2009, half a year before the end of the Great Recession, to $18,828 this January, or $3,000 less than what the wages would have been if they kept pace with inflation 4 ½ years into the recovery.

“Every time you hear someone say ‘I can’t find the workers I need,’ add the phrase ‘at the wage I want to pay’,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist for the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C., economic research organization.

People are choosing not to work because the pay is too low. Not surprising.

jtleek/capitalIn21stCenturyinR

The data sets and analysis for Piketty’s Capital In The 21st Century. In R. On github.

Amartya Sen: I think that Piketty’s conclusions mostly stand

I think that Piketty’s conclusions mostly stand. There are one or two exceptions, including the fact that these conclusions probably apply a little less to the United Kingdom than to many of the other countries which he discusses – they certainly apply to the United States very well. So I think that the summary story that inequality has been growing quite sharply in recent decades, and in recent years in particular, is true.

The Piketty Panic

what’s really new about “Capital” is the way it demolishes that most cherished of conservative myths, the insistence that we’re living in a meritocracy in which great wealth is earned and deserved.

In the warped little minds of the hard right, the real problem isn’t capitalism (which they redefine as needed) but crony capitalism (which they also redefine as needed) where the very wealthy use the state to steal wealth. But we also can’t tax those people because that’s theft and will reduce the incentive for them to work hard. And pointing out the contradiction is Marxism.

Ha-Joon Chang: Economics Is A Political Argument

I am seeking to debunk this widespread view, propagated by the current generation of economists, that somehow you can neatly separate economics from politics.

I don’t agree with everything he says, but he makes some amazing points. I agree with his main point. Worth a read.

Apple and Google’s wage-fixing cartel involved dozens more companies, over one million employees

My libertarian friends keep telling me that in a free market this type of thing simply can not happen. That companies will bid-up the wages of in-demand workers and could never take action to suppress those wages without state involvement. After all, in a free market everything is voluntary.

Those million tech workers must have voluntary agreed to the wage suppression agreement somehow. In some way I just can not see.

Work Like a German

Germany suffered a more precipitous drop in gross domestic product than the United States, but it experienced almost no change in unemployment. Here, it doubled. Today, unemployment in Germany is actually lower than it was pre-crisis, and long-term unemployment is negligible.

Rather than enforce austerity on the population, German reformed and improved its social safety net during the crisis and is better for it.

We have a growing problem with disability insurance. But because its whiter, more southern and more male than the nation as a whole, no one dare call it welfare. When white southern men get paid to not work it’s not welfare.

MtGox knowingly traded non-existent bitcoins for two weeks, filing shows

Every Bitcoin devotee claims this simply could not happen. you can’t buy and sell bitcoins that don’t exist. Fractional reserve isn’t possible.

So how did it happen?

Bitcoin Wound Up Being Just As Broken as the Corrupt Banking System It Was Trying to Kill

Bitcoin became a thing based largely on the enthusiasm of the same types of people who pushed gold to $1,921 an ounce in 2011 – not surprisingly, this was shortly after Congress’ Big Red Shoes performance in the debt-ceiling crisis that August. Both were based on the notion that Congress, the Fed and the European Union were running traditional currency into the ground. This was always a crazy idea. It was a reaction to emergency monetary policy rooted in a mix of a misunderstanding of what former Fed Chair Ben Bernanke was doing and cultural-political alienation that dates back to the right’s reaction to the sixties, if not the dawn of time. …
But the real point is that if you have to even ask what Bitcoin is, Bitcoin really isn’t much

The value of bitcoins stolen seems to be greater than the value of bitcoins traded for goods and services not related to bitcoin speculation. When you point this out you are branded a hater.