Political Economy category archive

The rich get richer, the poor get poorer. The San Jose Mercury-News has the figures:

Puny wage increases that have been chewed up by inflation have left hundreds of thousands of Bay Area workers worse off than they were 10 years ago.

But top wage earners have seen their paychecks soar by 26 percent over the same period when adjusted for inflation. That’s widened the gap between those on the top and bottom of the workforce.

A decade ago, the average wages of those in the lowest income categories were 66 percent below the average pay of the workers perched on the highest rungs of the income ladder. But 10 years later, the divide has reached 73 percent.

Applications for jobless benefits decreased by 14,000 in the week ended June 30 to 374,000, the fewest since mid May, Labor Department figures showed today. Economists forecast 385,000 claims, according to the median estimate in a Bloomberg News survey. A Labor Department spokesman said there was nothing unusual in the data.

(snip)

The four-week moving average, a less-volatile measure, fell to 385,750 last week from 387,250.

The number of people continuing to collect jobless benefits climbed by 4,000 in the week ended June 23 to 3.31 million. The continuing claims figure does not include the number of workers receiving extended benefits under federal programs.

According to Bloomberg last week, that week’s figures were a disaster because they were slightly higher than Bloomberg’s “experts” predicted. Therefore these figures must be wonderful because they are lower than the “experts” predicted.

The figures lead to one inescapable conclusion. Bloomberg needs new experts.

August J. Pollak advances a theory about why so many folks oppose health care (and other) reforms so vehemently.

I’m not necessarily agreeing with it, but I think it’s worth considering.

It’s sort of an economic analogy of the classic definition of Puritanism as the bone-chilling fear that somewhere, someone is having fun.

A nugget (warning: mild language):

America has the most dysfunctional sense of reward ever. We idolize the rich, regardless of how they earned their riches and in many cases in spite of it. We’ll watch a TV show about useless idiots or a rich asshole firing people or a random person becoming a millionaire because they are good at spinning a wheel or remembering aspects of pop culture. But we’ll turn around and be furious that we might all have to start contributing to a system that betters another person’s ability to take care of themselves when they’re sick because that’s not “fair.”

The entire history of opposition to progressive change in America is based on thinking that someone who isn’t you is having their life improved. And I’m sure it goes without saying that the history of opposition to progressive change just happens to go hand in hand with said progressive change being related to improving the lives of people who aren’t white, aren’t male and aren’t rich, or at the very least in elite social circles.

The Philadelphia Inquirer pens a paean to the last Silverliner II commuter cars, self-propelled electric train cars designed for commuter service, which first entered revenue service nearly 50 years ago.

Indeed, when I lived in Narberth, Pa., I rode to work and play in Center City almost every day on Silverliner II trains. They weren’t particularly elegant and were about as streamlined as bricks, but they worked.

They worked for almost half a century.

The Budd factory and the Baldwin Engine Works, as well as most other heavy manufacturing in Philly, are long gone.

One little sentence about halfway through the story encapsulates the legacy of vulture capitalists and bubblicious banksters, an epitaph for an economy:

The once-thriving Budd plant on Red Lion Road that employed about 2,500 workers was demolished in the late 1990s, giving way to a golf course that is now closed.

No significant change:

Jobless claims decreased by 6,000 to 386,000 in the week ended June 23, in line with the median forecast of economists surveyed by Bloomberg News, Labor Department figures showed today in Washington. The prior week’s reading was revised up to 392,000 from 387,000, matching an April figure as the steepest of 2012.

(snip)

The four-week moving average decreased to 386,750 from 387,500, which was the highest since the week ended Dec. 3.

Joe:

You’ve got to give Mitt Romney credit. He’s a job creator. In Singapore. China. India. He’s been very good at creating jobs. Overseas.

One hundred years ago, robber barons ruled Montana:

. . . oligarchs were making their desires known.

A massive corporation controlled legislators and judges, and a commentator observed that “local folks now found themselves locked in the grip of a corporation controlled from Wall Street and insensitive to their concerns.”

An expert testified before the U.S. Senate about “large sums of money that have been expended” on campaigns and how “many people have become so indifferent to voting.”

Dan Morain considers how the Citizens Benighted ruling is greasing the skids accelerating the dominance of our modern robber barons. Follow the link to see how the past is repeating itself.

PoliticalProf:

Median US income, 2011: $51,000.

Tax deductions Anne Romney took in 2011 for care and upkeep of her horse, Rafalca, who is now going to the Olympics in dressage: $77,000.

Jobless claims decreased by 2,000 to 387,000 in the week ended June 16, Labor Department figures showed today in Washington. The median forecast of 45 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News called for 383,000. The four-week average, a less volatile measure, climbed to the highest of the year.

(snip)

The four-week moving average increased to 386,250, the highest since the week ended Dec. 3, from 382,750.

Last week included the 12th of the month, which coincides with the period the Labor Department uses in its survey of employers to calculate monthly payroll growth. The four-week average for the May survey week was about 10,000 lower, indicating little progress this month. The employment report for June will be released on July 6.

Bloomberg thinks that the big news is that the decrease was less than their “experts” expected.

They left out the part about their experts almost always being wrong–sometimes high, sometimes low, but almost always wrong.

The idea behind an IPO is that an enterprise is worth investment in the expectation of monetary return. In the case of online services, the commercial value is based on whether someone is willing to pay for the service (Netflix, Hulu) or whether the service can bamboozle persons in to buying stuff they don’t need for prices they can’t afford (Facebook, Huffington Post).

By either yardstick the verdict on Facebook would seem to be, “errr, no, not really, uh-uh.”

Considering this, Donna Flagg, blogging at Psychology Today, wonders how to value Facebook.

Even then, what do so many companies spend their money trying to get customers to do? That’s right. “Like us.” But liking isn’t buying and for all intents and purposes, in business terms, is worthless.

(snip)

Still, many experts believe the real value lies in the money that can be made off the swelling number of eyeballs rapt by the stream of information and trivia updating newsfeeds by the nanosecond. Maybe, in theory, this is true. But not if those eyeballs are more interested in themselves and what their friends are doing than they are in the pesky, persistent ads that aren’t distinguishable enough to stand out and ultimately blend into the rest of the background.

Barry X. Kuhle sticks his tongue firmly in his cheek and attempts a diagnosis:

Now I’m no clinician, but it seems that prominent Republicans have evidenced each of these ten telltale signs of mental illness over the past year:

1) Denial: humans did not evolve; Obama is not a native-born American Christian

2) Delusion: climate is not changing

3) Hallucination: God ordained me to be President

4) Disordered Thinking: being for small government that’s huge in the bedroom; being anti-contraception and anti-abortion

5) Anger: Newt Gingrich’s perpetual scowl

6) Anti-social Behavior: toward women, gays, minorities, anyone without an umbilical cord or trust fund

7) Sexual Preoccupation: a fervent compulsion to control when we can mate, with whom we can mate, and precisely how we are allowed to mate (which I lampoon in Why Do Politicians Want to Police Dick and Jane’s Private Parts?)

8) Grandiosity: even Rick Santorum recognizes Gingrich’s “over the moon” grandiosity

9) General Oddness: Ron Paul

10) Paranoia: pretty much all of them, all of the time

Steve Chapman’s column today seems rather muddled.

He seems to start off intending to counter claims that President Obama’s administration has, by and large, pursued responsible budgetary policies (“Yes, Virginia, there was a spending binge”).

Unfortunately for that thesis, Chapman finds this line derailed by some of those pesky “facts” for which he seems to have an unusual respect (which is one reason I read his columns).

He winds up admitting that the legacy of Bushonomics makes reducing (or even restraining) the national debt, at least in the short term, a fiscally impossible endeavor (emphasis added).

But if there is anyone who has no grounds to fault the president for fiscal recklessness, it’s Republicans. The Wall Street Journal, however, recently ran an editorial titled “Obama’s debt boom,” which said that when it comes to debt, Obama “is taking America to a place it has never been.”

Maybe so, but he couldn’t have done it without the GOP. Under Bush, the budget surplus — yes, we once had a federal budget surplus — vanished, giving way to repeated deficits running into the hundreds of billions.

Under Bush, the publicly held federal debt more than doubled. One reason Obama has run deficits is that he has to cover the interest payments for all the borrowing done before he took over.

Bush, it’s worth noting, didn’t launch his spending spree in his final fiscal year. He did it in his first. From 2001 to 2008, federal spending rose by 31 percent, after adjustment for inflation, and went from 18.2 percent of GDP to 20.8 percent of GDP — a 14 percent increase. Oh, and then there was the 2009 deluge of red ink, most of which came from Bush’s inkwell.

Republicans: watch what they do, not what they say.

and not much change:

Claims for jobless benefits unexpectedly climbed by 6,000 to 386,000 in the week ended June 9 from a revised 380,000 the prior week that was more than first estimated, Labor Department figures showed today in Washington.

(snip useless drivel and about “economists predicted”)

The unemployment insurance report showed the four-week moving average of claims, a less-volatile measure, climbed to 382,000, the highest since April 28, from 378,500.

The number of people continuing to collect jobless benefits decreased by 33,000 in the week ended June 2 to 3.28 million. The continuing claims figure does not include the number of workers receiving extended benefits under federal programs.

Not great, but not nearly so bad as all the agonizing this week would seem to have anticipated.
Indeed, a bit of a drop, for all practical purposes, no chance.

First-time claims for jobless benefits fell by 12,000 to 377,000 in the week ended June 2 from a revised 389,000 the prior week that was higher than initially estimated, the Labor Department said today. The median estimate of 49 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News called for 378,000 claims. The number of people receiving extended payments plunged.

(snip)

The four-week moving average of claims, a less-volatile measure, climbed to 377,750, the highest in a month, from 376,000.

The number of people continuing to collect jobless benefits increased 34,000 in the week ended May 26 to 3.29 million. The continuing claims figure does not include the number of workers receiving extended benefits under federal programs.

Describing what’s happening in Greece, Atrios encapsulates the sales pitech for “austerity” in order to “restore confidence”:

By making sure nobody had any money, everyone would have the confidence to spend!

Aside:

Have you noticed that the proponents of “auterity” have one outstanding thing in common:

Money, lots of money.

Still, for all practical purposes, treading water:

First-time claims for jobless benefits increased by 10,000 to 383,000 in the week ended May 26 from a revised 373,000 the prior week, the Labor Department said today. The initial claims exceeded the median estimate of 370,000 in a Bloomberg News survey of economists. The number of people on unemployment benefit rolls dropped.

(snip)

The four-week moving average, a less-volatile measure, rose to 374,500 from 370,750.

The number of people continuing to collect jobless benefits dropped by 36,000 in the week ended May 19 to 3.24 million. The continuing claims figure does not include the number of workers receiving extended benefits under federal programs.

Via Bob Cesca’s Awesome Blog.