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I have been regularly following the scientific literature on the labour market impacts of COVID-19 and as the evidence is becoming richer we are getting a clearer idea of those impacts. The short conclusion is that public health policy makers, under pressure from ill-informed individual and corporate interests, have failed dramatically to protect the public…

Policymakers are often interested in the degree to which changes in prices are driven by shocks to supply or demand. One way to estimate the contributions of these shocks is with a structural vector autoregression identified using sign restrictions on the slopes of demand and supply curves. The appeal of this approach is that it relies on uncontroversial assumptions. However, sign restrictions only identify decompositions up to a set. I characterise the conditions under which these sets are informative, examining both historical decompositions (contributions to outcomes) and forecast error variance decompositions (contributions to variances). I use this framework to estimate the contributions of supply and demand shocks to inflation in the United States. While the sign restrictions yield sharp conclusions about the drivers of inflation in some expenditure categories, they tend to yield uninformative decompositions of aggregate inflation. A 'bottom-up' decomposition of aggregate inflation is less informative than a decomposition that uses the aggregate data directly.

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

“I have to do it my way.” —Donald Trump Republicans are whining because their leader, the man who has always been a demented imbecile, is acting like a demented imbecile: “He’s rattled and needs to get on message,” one GOP House member told NOTUS. “Life’s too hard for too many; the border was left open; and everyone is paying too much for too little.” Another GOP House member called Trump’s attacks on Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp “extremely foolish” and, like many who spoke to NOTUS for this story, urged the former president to stay disciplined and focus on the issues. “If he displayed self-discipline and impulse control, he’d win,” this member said. “The issues favor us. He’s been unable to focus on the issues and is behind. This is his race to lose, and he’s shooting himself in the foot. There’s some Trump fatigue too, and if he’d focus on issues and get off the personality attacks, he’d connect more with voters.” And another GOP congressman was even more clear-eyed. “Let’s be real: He lost in ’20,” this congressman told NOTUS.

Almost three-quarters of a century ago, my mother placed a message in a bottle and tossed it out beyond the waves. It bobbed along through tides, storms, and squalls until just recently, almost four decades after her death, it washed ashore at my feet. I’m speaking metaphorically, of course. Still, what happened, even stripped of the metaphors, does astonish me. So here, on the day after my 71st birthday, is a little story about a bottle, a message, time, war (American-style), my mom, and me. Recently, based on a Google search, a woman emailed me at the website I run, TomDispatch, about a 1942 sketch by Irma Selz that she had purchased at an estate sale in Seattle. Did it,... Read more

Source: Requiem for the Home Front appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

Trump even claims the Democrats rigged their own election The organizing principle of the MAGA GOP is that everything in the world is “rigged” against Donald Trump. And that includes the Democratic Party’s own nominating process: During a rally in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, on Saturday, Trump repeatedly blamed Harris and Democrats for Biden dropping out of the race more than a month ago — undermining Harris’ legitimacy as a candidate and highlighting his one-time opponent. He claimed, without evidence, that the upcoming Democratic National Convention in Chicago next week is “rigged” because Biden isn’t on the ticket. He said Biden is a worse debater than Democratic Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman, who suffered a stroke. And Trump accused the media of being biased in favor of the president. “What happened to Biden? I was running against Biden and now I’m running against someone else,” Trump said.

The top is the headline from the new Washington Post/ABC/Ipsos poll which shows that Harris has taken the lead nationally by 4 points. As the NY Times Pitchbot satire account points out the characterization of her holding a “slight” lead is more than a little bit pinched. The newspapers are mad that she isn’t pounding at their doors begging to be interviewed 24/7 (the John McCain good old boys bus tours still remain their fondest dream.) So the coverage is hedged, to say the least. The national polls are interesting, of course, if we want to know how the country at large is perceiving the race. But as we know, the real question is where we stand in the antiquated electoral college. Dan Pfeiffer’s newsletter today took a deep dive into the polls. He discussed “the Blue Wall” strategy which until Harris took over was considered the only path Biden had to win. , Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin and the single district in Nebraska would get him to 270 and at the time he dropped out no other swing states appeared to be in play.

According to Matt Pottinger, ‘a China expert and deputy national security adviser in the Trump White House…anyone who has entertained the idea of stable ties with Beijing is really smoking dope.’ If that’s what it takes, it might be time to light up. Continue reading »

In trying to Palestine’s prospects of independence and peace with Israel, one is reminded of Tolstoy’s observation that ‘All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’. This is to say that, successful claims to independence share common features, but the circumstances of Palestine’s aspiration for independence are distinctively its Continue reading »

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 18 2024

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

The world will lose $4.7 trillion of revenue in the next decade to tax havens. How did we get here? 

[The Business Standard, via Naked Capitalism 08-16-2024]

Two plotters of the assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse were exposed as DEA informants. Another was unmasked as an FBI informant. Now, newly-released court documents provide the most startling evidence yet linking the conspirators with the US government. A South Florida businessman accused of funding the plot to assassinate former Haitian President Jovenel Moise received legal advice endorsing a mission to capture the head of state from a confidential informant of a US intelligence agency, court documents unveiled in July […]

The post Accused financier of Moise assassination apparently advised by US intelligence first appeared on The Grayzone.

The post Accused financier of Moise assassination apparently advised by US intelligence appeared first on The Grayzone.

“They’ll say he was rambling,” he said. “I don’t ramble. I’m a really smart guy, you know, really smart. I don’t ramble.” In the speech, Trump defended his proposal to impose tariffs on China and other countries. Trump falsely described tariffs as a tax on those countries; in reality tariffs are paid by domestic consumers. “A lot of people like to say, ‘Oh, it’s a tax on us,’” Trump said. “No, no, no, it’s a tax on a foreign country.” Meanwhile, in the crowd: I just don’t know what to say. Can this country survive this level of puerile ignorance?

I’ve just released Chapter 9 of my open access textbook. This chapter focuses on youth homelessness. A ‘top 10’ overview of the chapter can be found here: https://nickfalvo.ca/youth-homelessness/

Remember when Trump’s first campaign rally was held in Waco Texas on the anniversary of the Branch Davidian standoff and he showed video of the January 6th insurrection on the big video screens. I knew you did. Well, he’s at it again: The Harris campaign attacked former president Donald Trump on Saturday for an upcoming event in Howell, Mich., where white supremacists last month rallied and chanted “We love Hitler. We love Trump.” A Trump spokeswoman strongly denied any link between their planned campaign event Tuesday and the racist rally, calling the accusation “absurd.” About a dozen masked white supremacists marched through downtown Howell on July 20. Pictures and video from the event showed attendees declaring their support for the former president while waving banners with white supremacist slogans. Howell has long been associated with the Ku Klux Klan because of the rallies Michigan-based Grand Dragon Robert Miles held on a nearby farm in the 1970s and 1980s, although community leaders have worked to shake off that image. (Miles died in 1992).

Better late…. The 2024 DNC national convention kicks off officially tomorrow morning. But first, thousands from 57 delegations will arrive today from 50 states, D.C. and the territories. The schedule for the daytime caucus meetings and panels, primetime speeches, and afterparties that will challenge the fire marshal, is pretty daunting. Days start early and go late. Also, I lose an hour for morning writing to Central Time. So please excuse my absence here from Monday through Friday. I’ll drop something when I can. ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.

Swing state again The Associated Press had already called the presidential race for Barack Obama that night in November 2008. One state they had not called was mine. After the celebration at our watch party subsided, the TV still showed Sen. John McCain up by 3,000 votes in North Carolina. There was only one county of the handful left to report with any quantity of votes in it. Again, mine. Where was Buncombe? A friend, a precinct election judge, pushed through the crowd and slid up on my right. He’d just arrived from the Board of Elections office where they’d had a data upload glitch. He shoved a sheaf of printouts into my hand. The tally read 17,000 net votes for Obama. North Carolina just went blue. That’s a feeling we haven’t revisited since then. Maybe this year. New York Times: President Biden’s campaign declared in its earliest days that he had a strong chance of winning North Carolina, even though no Democrat had captured the state since Barack Obama’s victory in 2008. That claim began to look implausible as Mr. Biden plummeted in the polls and Democrats grew anxious about reliably blue states like Minnesota and Virginia.

Refugees have dramatically stepped up their campaign for permanent visas, with encampments in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.

The post Refugees take fight for permanent visas to Labor’s doorstep first appeared on Solidarity Online.