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Nominal Earnings Growth and Money Illusion (Real Wages are Rising)
Alan Reynolds Wall Street Journal columnist E.S. Browning presents a graph titled “Wages Still Soft …  hourly wage gains have been sluggish.”   It shows the percentage change in average hourly earnings from a year earlier.  That rate of change slowed from about 3.5 percent in early 2009 to 1.5 percent in late 2012 before rising to 2.2-2.4 percent in recent months.   The upside, in Browning’s view, is that “wage gains still aren’t big enough to push inflation higher.”  In reality, wage gains never push inflation higher, but inflation can certainly push real wages lower. ...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - November 10, 2014 Category: American Health Authors: Alan Reynolds Source Type: blogs

When Mean-Tested Benefits Rose, Labor Force Participation Fell
Alan Reynolds The U.S. job market has tightened by many measures – more advertised job openings, fewer claims for initial unemployment insurance, substantial reduction in long-term unemployment and the number of discouraged workers.  Yet the percentage of working-age population that is either working or looking for work (the labor force participation rate) remains extremely low.  This is a big problem, since projections of future economic growth are constructed by adding expected growth of productivity to growth of the labor force. Why have so many people dropped out of the labor force?  Since they’re not wor...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - February 5, 2015 Category: American Health Authors: Alan Reynolds Source Type: blogs

Why Businesses Migrate from Greece to Bulgaria: Smaller Government Is Cheaper
Alan Reynolds What “prompted many Greek manufacturers to relocate to neighboring Bulgaria” is not just less-capricious regulation, as The Wall Street Journal suggests, but also the much lower cost of government. Bulgaria has a 10% flat tax on corporate and personal income and a 20% VAT. Greece has a 49% personal income tax, 26% corporate tax, 45% payroll tax and 23% VAT.  Unbearable tax rates drive a fourth of the Greek economy underground while businesses in the formal economy migrate or shut down. What about government spending (which Keynesian economists call “fiscal stimulus”)?  Government spending i...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - February 11, 2015 Category: American Health Authors: Alan Reynolds Source Type: blogs

How Not to Spin a Big Drop in Top 1% Incomes
Alan Reynolds When Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez release their annual estimates of top 1 percent incomes, you can count on The New York Times to put it in a front page headline with additional hype on the editorial page.  This time, however, the news was that the top 1 percent had suffered a 14.9 percent decline in real income in 2013 if capital gains are included, as they always had been until now.   The New York Times heroic spin was “The Gains From the Economic Recovery Are Still Limited to the Top One Percent.”  The author, Justin Wolfers of the Peterson Institute wrote, “Emmanuel Saez …...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - February 18, 2015 Category: American Health Authors: Alan Reynolds Source Type: blogs

Bipartisan Baloney About Top 1 Percent Income Gains
Alan Reynolds In the State of the Union address on January 20, President Obama said, “those at the top have never done better… Inequality has deepened.”  The following day, Fox News anchor Brett Baier said, “According to the work of Emmanuel Saez, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, during the post-recession years of 2009-2012, top earners snagged a greater share of total income growth than during the boom years of 2002-2007. In other words, income inequality has become more pronounced since the Bush administration, not less.”  Senator Bernie Sanders agrees that “in recent year...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - February 19, 2015 Category: American Health Authors: Alan Reynolds Source Type: blogs

Bottom 90% Pretax Pretransfer Income is no Proxy for Median After-Tax Income
Alan Reynolds This graph illustrates a few points made in my recent Wall Street Journal article.  First of all, the Piketty & Saez mean average of bottom 90% incomes per tax unit is not a credible proxy for median household income, particularly since the big reductions in middle-class taxes from 1981 to 2003. Second, the red bars claiming bottom 90% incomes in the past six years have been no higher than they were in 1980 (Sen. Warren) or even 1968 (see the graph) is literally unbelievable.  If that were true then all other income statistics – including GDP – would have to be com...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - March 3, 2015 Category: American Health Authors: Alan Reynolds Source Type: blogs

Furman’s Folly: Nostalgia about 1973 and Nonsense about the Bottom 90 Percent
Alan Reynolds Jason Furman, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, set out to explain “middle-class economics” in the Wall Street Journal, March 11, in an earlier Vox blog and in a presentation to National Association of Business Economists (NABE), as well as the first chapter of the Economic Report of The President.  The intent is to make the recent economy look healthier (massaging 2.3-2.4 percent growth for 2013-14 into 2.7 percent), and to claim that “subpar” 2010-14 income gains for the middle class (generously defined as the bottom 90 percent) are not due to a subpar recovery but to something that h...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - March 11, 2015 Category: American Health Authors: Alan Reynolds Source Type: blogs

The Dollar, Oil Prices and Exports: Lessons of Recent History
Alan Reynolds Business news pages are suddenly full of hand-wringing about how the rising dollar threatens to slash U.S. exports and economic growth.  “The strong dollar is the biggest threat to economic recovery,” warns one reporter.  Others quote White House chief economist Jason Furman saying “the strong dollar is undoubtedly a headwind” for the U.S. economy. It’s not that simple. The graph above compares real U.S. exports with the trade-weighted exchange rate.  The dollar was rising much faster in 1995-2000, when both exports and the economy were growing at an impressive pace.  Exports eventually fell w...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - March 14, 2015 Category: American Health Authors: Alan Reynolds Source Type: blogs

Dr. Alan Blum Points Out Big Tobacco Connections of Sponsor of Film on Cancer
Dr. Alan Blum - the Gerald Leon Wallace, M.D., Endowed Chair in Family Medicine at the University of Alabama and director of the Center for the Study of Tobacco and Society - published an interesting op-ed last Friday in the Tuscaloosa News. The commentary reveals that several of the sponsors of the recent PBS documentary on cancer as well as the Stand Up to Cancer telethon have strong connections to Big Tobacco and are actually helping contribute to the tobacco epidemic.I recommend reading the whole piece, but a few of the most relevant excerpts follow: "At the 16th World Conference on Tobacco or Health in Abu Dhabi last...
Source: The Rest of the Story: Tobacco News Analysis and Commentary - April 2, 2015 Category: Addiction Source Type: blogs

Familiar Yet Forgotten Tax Lessons from Ancient Greece and Rome
Alan Reynolds In Ancient Greece, “The politicians strained their ingenuity to discover new sources of public revenue… . The results of these imposts was a wholesale hiding of wealth and income, Evasion became universal, goods were seized, men were thrown into jail. But the wealth still hid itself, or melted away.” –Will Durant The Life of Greece, Simon and Schuster, 1939. P. 66.  In ancient Rome; “taxation rose to such heights that men lost incentive to work or earn, and an erosive contest began between lawyers finding devices to evade taxes and lawyers formulating laws to prevent evasion. The government issued...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - April 8, 2015 Category: American Health Authors: Alan Reynolds Source Type: blogs

Fact Checking a Fact Checker: About Rand Paul and Reagan
Alan Reynolds Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler gives Senator Rand Paul Three Pinocchios for making the following claim on TV: Ronald Reagan … said we’re going to dramatically cut tax rates. And guess what? More revenue came in, but tens of millions of jobs were created. Before examining whether or not “more revenue came in,” consider just how dramatic the Reagan-era tax changes really were.  Under the first bill in 1981, all personal tax rates were eventually reduced by 23%.  But it is often forgotten that these rate reductions in were foolishly delayed until 1984.  By then, however, the 49% tax brack...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - April 13, 2015 Category: American Health Authors: Alan Reynolds Source Type: blogs

Can Inequality Get Worse If Poverty Gets Better?
Alan Reynolds Jim Tankersley of the Washington Post believes he has discovered “The Big Issue With Hillary Clinton Running Against Inequality”: “Inequality got worse under Bill Clinton, not better. That’s true if you look at the share of American incomes going to the 1 percent, per economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty. It’s also true when you look at the share of American wealth going to the super-super-rich, the top 0.1%, per research by Saez and Gabriel Zucman.” What this actually reveals is the absurdity of (1) defining inequality solely by top 1% shares of pretax income less government benefits, and...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - April 14, 2015 Category: American Health Authors: Alan Reynolds Source Type: blogs

Fact Checking a Fact Checker: About Rand Paul and Reagan
Alan Reynolds Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler gives Senator Rand Paul Three Pinocchios for making the following claim on TV: Ronald Reagan … said we’re going to dramatically cut tax rates. And guess what? More revenue came in, but tens of millions of jobs were created. Before examining whether or not “more revenue came in,” consider just how dramatic the Reagan-era tax changes really were.  Under the first bill in 1981, all personal tax rates were eventually reduced by 23%.  But it is often forgotten that these rate reductions in were foolishly delayed until 1984.  By then, however, the 49% tax brack...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - April 13, 2015 Category: American Health Authors: Alan Reynolds Source Type: blogs

A Wannabe Winemaker Plots The Path To A New Health Care Delivery System
Health Affairs Editor-in-Chief Alan Weil recently surprised readers with his comments on “Why I Oppose Payment Reform.” Those of us who fell for that bit of click bait discovered that, of course, he does not oppose reform. Rather, he wanted to remind us that payment reform is just a piece of the puzzle in driving better value and better quality in American health care and that much more needs to be done. Different readers likely had different reactions, but this Californian saw immediately where he was going… On a recent trip through wine country with out-of-town guests, a friend quipped how nice it would be to own ...
Source: Health Affairs Blog - April 28, 2015 Category: Health Management Authors: Murray Ross Tags: Costs and Spending Featured Health Professionals Hospitals Payment Policy Quality Alan Weil Consumers Health Care Delivery Payment Reform Value Source Type: blogs