Rolling US Economy Into The Shitbin Thread

I vote mechanical pencils and graph paper

fwiw this has been front page of bbc news for the past couple of days (with an "austerity debunked" rather than "lol excel" headline)

lol excel headline

http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2013/04/17/rogoff-reinhart-excel-errors/

man what kind of fucking scientist uses excel to crunch numbers, a social scientist, that's what kind

totally widespread in econ :-(

real science has too many numbers for excel.

well most of the time if an econ model is too complicated for excel its gonna be mostly nonsense for other reasons

there are many things you can do in excel that you never ever should.

"well most of the time if an econ model is too complicated for excel its gonna be mostly nonsense for other reasons"

lol

i've seen things. horrible things that no man should ever have to see. and done things too. i tell myself i was just following instructions, but sometimes, at night, i wake up screaming and screaming and i couldn't tell you why.

preach it brother paul

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/22/opinion/krugman-the-jobless-trap.html?ref=paulkrugman&_r=1&

there are many things you can do in excel that you never ever should.

lol indeed ... like pivots.

http://www.gamesexcel.com/games-excel-super-mario-bros.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZ6Q224UPkc

this one is great but only shows up for me in 240p

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_whSnPErl7c

It's all Bush's fault

http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/04/23/a-rise-in-wealth-for-the-wealthydeclines-for-the-lower-93/

http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/files/2013/04/SDT-2013-04-wealth-recovery-0-1.png

it's high time we cut taxes on the wealthy again

why 93%/$836,033 as a cutoff, out of curiosity?

oh nm sry:

(The focus in this report on the upper 7% of households rather than some other share of high wealth households reflects the limits of the tabulations published by the Census Bureau. The boundaries of its wealth categories dictated the split of households analyzed in this report.)

if that chart doesn't spur a new round of tax raising, then you people need to abandon hope for this administration

It's almost as if when bush left office all the laws that hugely favored the wealthy signed by him and the last x presidents stayed in effect.

you know, you people

DJIA has doubled since then. FYI.

well the start date kinda matters there

starting it in 1981 would be really interesting too

Even more interesting at 1975

THE UNDERGROUND RECOVERY!
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2013/04/29/130429ta_talk_surowiecki?currentPage=all

It’s a huge number: if the government managed to collect taxes on all that income, the deficit would be trivial. This unreported income is being earned, for the most part, not by drug dealers or Mob bosses but by tens of millions of people with run-of-the-mill jobs—nannies, barbers, Web-site designers, and construction workers—who are getting paid off the books.

a lot of those people would wind up paying little or no federal income tax anyway (although they would certainly pay payroll taxes), so I think the deficit assumption here is a bit off

don weiner sometimes it seems like you believe you have been sent here to troll us into seeing the light, but that if we don't soon see the error of our ways, you will forlornly return to your home planet

Off-the-books activity also helps explain a mystery about the current economy: even though the percentage of Americans officially working has dropped dramatically, and even though household income is still well below what it was in 2007, personal consumption is higher than it was before the recession, and retail sales have been growing briskly (despite a dip in March). Bernard Baumohl, an economist at the Economic Outlook Group, estimates that, based on historical patterns, current retail sales are actually what you’d expect if the unemployment rate were around five or six per cent, rather than the 7.6 per cent we’re stuck with.

we're all undocumented now

don weiner sometimes it seems like you believe you have been sent here to troll us into seeing the light, but that if we don't soon see the error of our ways, you will forlornly return to your home planet

It's been 11 or 12 years. I must be very stubborn. Or very stupid. Likely both!

Being a moderate republican is a very cold and lonely place these days. We should allow don to come in and warm himself by the genial fire that is ilx. Like any moderate, his trolling is very pastel colored.

i'm curious what don would do about income inequality

Like any moderate, his trolling is very pastel colored.

I voted for Obama twice, so I must be mellowing with age.

I'm not bothered much by income inequality per se; I'm more bothered at how the system is gamed. Maybe that's the same thing. I don't think raising taxes will control income inequality very much or even change it much. Is there an effective system where the rich don't get richer?

heavily subsidizing higher education worked pretty well in the post-WWII years

the united federation of planets

heavily subsidizing higher education worked pretty well in the post-WWII years

how did that work? Across the board (scholarship, funding academic chairs, research, etc.)?

xp

low tuition at public u's, pell grants, the gi bill, etc.

even w/ heavily subsidized higher ed, there were fewer college grads back then then there are now

like 'lots of people go to college' was part of the economic prosperity of the era but it wasn't something that happened in a vacuum, the us was in a fairly unique place in history post-ww2. 'get more people to go to college' might be as helpful for income inequality as 'fund more sockhops'

imagine no student loans, but higher taxes on the wealthy to pay for higher education. more young people with greater spending power to keep the economy moving. it's easy if you try

'young people don't have enough money' is definitely a problem but it's probably not the root of our economic malaise

What do you think we could do to significantly shrink income inequality iatee?

One characteristic of old people is that they spend very little on consumer goods compared to young people just starting a household or a family. otoh, old people with money are a huge boon to the pharmaceuticals industry.

soak the rich xp

pretty much works by definition

maybe we should try it sometime then

We did during WWII.

I think the idea that we'll create millions of middle class jobs through govt tweaking policy this was or that way is pretty much a dream. we're in the new normal, the question is how we deal w/ it. even w/ strong economic growth sometime in the future income inequality will continue to climb, as job creation will stick to a bipolar distribution.

Aren't most of the significant gains in wealth inequality related to equity ownership? Or is it primarily wages?