On the front page of the Wall Street Journal deadtree edition for Saturday, March 21, 2009:
WSJ Headlines From One Year Ago Today
March 21st, 2010Russia’s Rule of Lawlessness
Unemployment, Clear and Graphic
March 20th, 2010MintLife produces beautiful graphics on lots of topics. Today’s topic: explaining total unemployment in the U.S. economy, together with the pieces that make up the unemployed population:
- Not in labor force: currently 83.8 million
-
Labor force: currently 153.2 million made up of
- Unemployed: currently 16 million
- Employed: currently 137.2 million
Those employed (137.2 million) support both those unemployed (16 million) and those not in the labor force (83.2 million).
And the Democrats are working their tails off to take a bigger bite out of the paychecks of those employed and their employers.
Check out MintLife’s graphic.
WSJ Headlines From One Year Ago Today
March 20th, 2010On the front page of the Wall Street Journal deadtree edition for Friday, March 20, 2009:
House Passes Bonus Tax Bill
90% Hit Would Affect Major Banks; Senate Mulls Similar Action Amid AIG Furor
U.S. Courts Former Warlords In Its Bid for Afghan Stability
Raters See Windfall In Bailout Program
Our Family Will Get No Subsidy Under Obamacare
March 20th, 2010Fun and anguish with our home budget, Obamacare and Kaiser’s health reform subsidy calculator.
First transparency note: Kaiser’s calculator only allows up to a family of four. We are larger, so we are screwed before hitting the submit button.
Second transparency note: we don’t qualify for a subsidy. I interpolated** a monthly premium based on posted tables and family information.
Our current monthly premium (employee contribution added to employer contribution) is approximately $1040.
Under Obamacare, according to my guesstimate, our monthly combined premium will be about $1590.
Our projected monthly premium will increase by 53%.
But it’s not a tax increase. Remember: it is NOT a tax increase.
(Hat tip: Mike Allen’s Politico Playbook.)
* From the Kaiser calculator webpage: “In general, full-time employees with employer coverage available that meets specified requirements are not eligible for premium subsidies, unless the employee would have to pay more than a certain percentage of income for the employer-provided coverage.”
** “Interpolated” is a fancy word for estimating numbers that fall in the cracks between measured data points. It’s often a straight-line average, which works well as long as either the function closely tracks a straight line, or the distance between the data points is small enough that a straight line will provide a reasonable estimate.
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Tracking GDI Through The Great Recession
March 20th, 2010Interesting proposition from Jeremy Nalewaik, covered by the Wall Street Journal, asserts that Gross Domestic Income (GDI) better shows the pain of The Great Recession than Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
Both GDP and GDI are tallied by the Commerce Department.
Gross Domestic Product is an estimate of the output of the national economy.
Gross Domestic Income is an estimate of the income of the national economy.
A look at the graph shows that GDI fell harder and faster during The Great Recession than GDP.
Imagine a pump emptying a reservoir when a drought hits. The volume of water flowing into the reservoir sharply decreases but the volume of water leaving can remain at the same level until the reservoir is emptied. Thereafter, outgo can at most match income.
So with GDI and GDP.
GDP could fall more slowly than GDI, but would eventually catch up. Should GDI recover quickly enough, GDP might bottom out at a higher level and begin rising. Should GDI scrape and bounce along the bottom, GDP will would at last eat mud as well.
As the WSJ article notes, 2009 Q4 GDI is not yet published.
The burning question: has GDI bottomed out and headed up? Or are we still all eating mud? (The graph of GDI for 2009 Q2 and Q3 is not conclusive. It shows definite improvement from Q1, but Q3 is worse than Q2.)
(Hat tip: Rocky Vega at Daily Reckoning.)
