Mike's Politics and Economics Blog

 It feels that our nation is splitting apart.  While many folks are in the "middle", the voices that are often the loudest are those from either the far left who unabashedly proclaim that capitalism is evil, or those on the far right who express palpable fear that the Marxists and Socialists are coming to take away their way of life.  As is the case for most "issues", reality slices in the middle.  But until the good folks of our nation embrace two principles, the tearing of our nation's fabric will continue. Principle One:   Capitalism is astoundingly powerful.  The power of the market to allocate resources is breathtaking.   Principle Two:   Capitalism without restraint leads to horrible inequality and the system eventually crushes itself. Communism  requires a squashing of human hopes, innovation, and oppression (or murder).   I seriously doubt that those who proclaim capitalism as evil would actually want to live in a communist ...

The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally sounded like a really bad idea from the start.  Covid has been politicized and bad info abounds.  But a recent study (it even made Fox News) claims that 266,000 cases of Covid are attributable to the event.  The authors of the study claim the rally can be linked to 20% of the cases in the US.  Just google Sturgis Covid and you'll see links to all the articles. I don't think this study passes the "smell test"! Fox News loves to play up stories that appeal to the right.  This one appeals to the left.  My guess is that the story is so attention getting to anyone, that Fox ran it and continues to run it since it is an attention getter. Why don't I like this study?  First, I must admit I didn't go deep into the weeds trying to understand the details of the analysis.  But I don't think I need to due to the study's overall methodology. Here are my concerns with the study in no particular order. 1)  The study inherently a...

Donald Trump raves about the strong economy he created - so lets look at how it performed under his presidency compared with Obama's.  To be fair, data for 2020 isn't included since even the first quarter's performance was impacted by the pandemic.  So lets use data for 2014 thru 2019.  That's the last three year's of Obama's presidency and the first three of Trumps (ok, a few weeks in 2016 were Obama's, but that should be close enough). The data we'll look at is non-seasonally adjusted GDP for a given quarter compared with the same quarter the previous year.  For more info on this measure and why I like it, scroll to the bottom of this post and read "Data Technical Details". So here is the chart: For each president's 3 years, there are ups and downs.  But their average performance was pretty similar!  So any boasting of one having done better than the other appears unfounded. But - and here is a big but, under Trump during this period, the...