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CNN Says Wages Are Skyrocketing!
Actually, CNN wouldn’t say that, or at least not directly. What it said, in yet another major piece on how the economy is awful, is that prices are skyrocketing: “The mix of local residents visiting...
View ArticleTell the New York Times that Social Security Is Not About to Disappear
Polls always show that many people, especially young people, don’t expect to see their Social Security benefits. I have been writing on this stuff long enough that many of the young people, telling me...
View ArticleWith a Modest Financial Transactions Tax, Jim Simons Would not Have Been...
The New York Times reported that Jim Simons, the founder of Medallion hedge fund, died this week. As a result of his fund, according to the article, he accumulated more than $20 billion over his...
View ArticleCNN Needs to Buy Its Economic Reporters Access to the Internet
CNN endlessly runs stories on troubled consumers that are completely at odds with government data. While its sources may have useful stories to tell, the government statistical agencies construct their...
View ArticleThe Problem with Electric Vehicles
For the last quarter century, those of us hoping we could slow global warming were anxious to see a quick conversion to electric vehicles (EVs). If we could get most people using electric vehicles, and...
View ArticleWould the New York Times Have Written a Piece at the End of 2019 Telling Us...
I ask because it ran that piece today and one of the major factoids cited was that wealth for the bottom half of the population is below its level before the Fed began raising interest rates. This is...
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Productivity Growth and the Scary Stories About Rising Retiree to Worker Ratios
In the wake of the release of the 2024 Social Security Trustees Report we have seen a wave of columns and news articles telling us that we won’t have enough workers to support a growing population of...
View ArticleThe Media Are Going Nuts on Tariffs, Why Are They Fine with...
There have been numerous pieces in major media outlets in recent days on the death of free trade which have been centered on the Biden administration’s use of tariffs to protect the U.S. market from...
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The People Who Own and Control the Washington Post Will Pay Lower Taxes with...
The Washington Post has felt the need to continually emphasize the negative aspects of the economy under Biden. Remember all those great pieces on the fastest real wage growth in a half-century for the...
View ArticleCNN Invents a Position for Trump on the Pandemic
During the first year of the pandemic the one consistent position held by Donald Trump was that he did not want to be held responsible for anything. He basically told this to Bob Woodward in interviews...
View ArticleGlobal Warming and the Threat of Cheap Chinese EVs
Suppose the G-7 finance ministers sat down and worked out a plan to spend tens of billions of dollars a year to subsidize developing countries in their transition to a green economy. Many of us might...
View ArticleThe Social Security Crisis Myth and Why We Can’t Say the Economy Is Good
Yesterday the Washington Post ran an editorial that bothered me more than most Washington Post editorials. The headline said it all, “Telling Americans the economy is good won’t work.” I knew I had...
View ArticleNYT Invents Story That Young College Graduates Can’t Find Jobs
The media are trying every way they can to push a bad economy story despite massive evidence that we are seeing the best economy in half a century. (No that doesn’t mean everyone is doing great, it...
View ArticleNo, the Saving Rate Is Not Near a Record Low
It has been popular for people commenting on the state of the economy to say that consumers have to pull back on consumption because they have exhausted their savings. A big part of this story is that...
View ArticleUnemployment Was Still Below 4.0 Percent in May
This is a bit nitpicky, but still a point worth making. If the unemployment rate came in below 4.0 percent in May, it would have been the 28th consecutive month of below 4.0 percent unemployment,...
View ArticleThe Productivity/Pay Gap and Phony Debates
New York Times columnist Peter Coy did a piece yesterday questioning the existence of a gap between productivity growth and the typical worker’s pay. This gap was established decades ago by my friends...
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CPI Without Owner’s Equivalent Rent Has Been at Fed Target for a Year
That’s a bit of an exaggeration, but the Consumer Price Index (CPI), excluding owners’ equivalent rent (OER) fell to 1.4 percent in June 2023 and has remained pretty close, but mostly above 2.0 percent...
View ArticleMaking the Bad Economy Case: College Grad Edition II
If we wanted to know what the job market looks like for recent college graduates, we would probably start by looking at their unemployment/employment rates. On the other hand, if we wanted to try to...
View ArticleTrump Says Chinese EVs Will Lead to a “Bloodbath” for U.S. Auto Industry, but...
Everyone knows that the Washington Post is owned and controlled by people who will pay lower taxes if Donald Trump gets back into the White House, but couldn’t it at least pretend to be a newspaper? In...
View ArticleWe Can’t Have a New Paradigm as Long as People Think the Old One Was...
The belief in free-market fundamentalism runs very deep. When I say that, I don’t mean that support for the concept runs deep, I mean the belief that we had been pursuing free-market policies in the...
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