Haiku Wednesday - Stress

STRESS

Time for a deep breath,

And positive self-talk.  I

Can't stress this enough.

Haiku Heights - Sacred

SACRED


Things I hold sacred:

Life, love, friendship, promises,

The trust of a child.

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Sunday Music Blogging - 9/26

Donna Diana Overture by Emil Nikolaus von Reznicek

Shadow Shot Sunday/Mellow Yellow Monday - 9/26-27

Take a turn in the

Circle for the bean bag toss.

It's all in the wrist!

Six Word Saturday

Flowers in front of our house

Gerber Daisy

Vinca



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UPDATE:  Mystic asks about the back yard.  Nope - not many flowers there.  The back yard has a different purpose.


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What the Hell Friday?!? - Part 2 - OMG Edition

I read right wing and/or libertarian blogs, at least once in a while, in a serious attempt to avoid epistemic closure.  It is often - in fact, to a distressing degree - a disappointingly fruitless endeavor.

The Money Illusion is being dropped from the list of blogs I will peruse, because I have concluded that Scott Sumner is insane.

Really?

Yes, really!

His adoring followers are pretty whacked-out, too.  They think the union busting Nazis were actually socialists.
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What The Hell?!? Friday - Unfortunately Misspelt Signage Edition

In South Bend, where sex education has evidently run amok.  Yikes!

All my other sign postings have either been my own shots or contributions from friends.  But this one, displayed at MSNBC.com is too -- er . . . good to pass up.

H/T to the LW
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Wealth and Taxes

Here is a breakdown of taxes and income for CY 2010, from our old friends, the Tax Policy Center, via Greg Mankiw's blog, which I actually don't read - this is what sometimes happens when you rely on TEH Googly.

Since I don't read  Mankiw, and he offers no commentary, it's far from clear what his point might be - maybe just general information.  And, since I see only a table at the TPC page, it's probably Mankiw's graph.
 
How they managed to assemble data on CY 2010 by Aug.24 of the subject year is a bit mysterious, but we'll just go with it.

You often see or hear that the top whatever percentage pays some god-awful amount of the taxes.  Sure enough, the top 5% of the population bear over 40% of the tax burden.  That 5% and 40% look oh, so askew.  Until you realize that they bring in over 30% of the income.

The reasons for this number combination are two-fold.  First, we have progressive taxation, so the tax percentage paid by the top is above their income percentage by design.  This is a feature, not a flaw.  Second, the lowest 20% pay no federal taxes, at all, because they make less than $1500 per month - not enough to qualify as tax payers.  That's about $9.38 per hour for a 160 hour work month.  Actually, it's  a bit less on an hourly basis, since most months have more than 20 work days. Further, since the next quintile only makes enough to pay a total of 3.1% of the tax total, it simply falls out of the math that the percentage has to be made up somewhere.

So if anyone tells you we are soaking the rich - show them this graph, courtesy of Prof. Mankiw.

Another thing to think about is that those who make the most will also get the greatest benefit from retaining the middle class tax cuts.

Bet you didn't know that part!

The Stimulus was actually Quite Stimulating

I love graphs and data.  And since I'm reality based, I also appreciate that real world data is consistent with my view of the world.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities offers a graphic look at the effects of the stimulus package, along with some speculation of what would have happened without it.   Find it here.

The bottom line is that for being too small, partly wasted on totally ineffective tax cuts, and, one might argue, poorly targeted, the stimulus package probably prevented – or at least deferred – a collapse into GD II.

What Is Holding Back Employment Growth?

Krugman offers a simple, straight-forward explanation:

 Businesses aren’t hiring because of poor sales, period, end of story

James Hamilton at Econbrowser disagrees, citing Russ Robert's specious contention that the twin problems are  taxation and regulation.  You can stop laughing now.  Roberts is from Cafe Hayek, and I've ridiculed him here before, though with the snark dialed down a bit, for me.  (And his response was quite gracious - I do admire that.)    Hamilton also displays Catherine Rampell's now notorious graph, though it's not at all clear that he read her text.  (I'm not going to reproduce it here.  It's in the links, and if you haven't seen it, you don't read anything about econ.)

All this set off an interesting and quite spirited comment string, where I was one of the commenters, natch.

My comments are brilliant, of course, but many others are also worth reading, (Johnathon's are particularly informative)  even those from the right-wingers - though mainly for their illustrative sheer wrongitude.  Interesting also, that total strangers had my back against some of the sillier contrary comments.  So I made sense, other than just to myself.

Food for thought.  Check it out.
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Hydrodynamic Macroeconomics

In a recent series of posts, Karl Smith allows himself the conceit of comparing macroeconomics to hydrodynamics.  I am deeply skeptical of any attempt to model economics along the lines of physics - that's where the dismal science started around the time of Adam Smith, and got off on seriously the wrong foot, IMHO.

But Karl goes on to look at direct empirical comparisons, and not be driven or constrained by his analogy. His correlation of job growth to change in the rate of inflation is quite compelling.

The text and other accompanying graphs are fascinating.  Check it out.

For me, the missing piece is how to get from monetary policy to Karl's inflation target of 4%.   He's promised to fill in the blanks, some time soon.
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Haiku Wednesday - Respect

RESPECT

How can I respect

The man we hired for his skills

Who doesn't do his job?

Of course, I mean this guy.