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Grocery Inflation Since 2019: BLS Data is Probably About Right
Grocery prices are definitely up a lot in the past few years. I’ve wrote about this several times before. But lately there has been a trend on social media to “post your receipts” and show how much...
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The Cumulative Effect of Small Changes in Economic Growth
A recent post from the blogger (Substacker?) Cremieux called Rich Country, Poor Country showed home small differences in economic growth add up over time. Because he used nominal GDP growth rates, I...
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Better Off Than 4 Years Ago? Median Family Income Edition
Are you better off than you were four years ago? That question was asked at the Presidential debate last night. But more importantly, we also got a massive amount of new data on income and poverty...
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The Top 1 Percent Paid a Lot of Taxes in 2021
In 2021 the top 1 percent of taxpayers in the United States paid 36 percent of all federal taxes (they have 21.1 percent of income). This figure had been below 20 percent until the mid-1990s, and as...
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Consumer Expenditures in 2023
Today BLS released the annual update to the Consumer Expenditure Survey, which is exactly what it sounds like: a survey of US consumers about what their spending. The sample size is “20,000...
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The Wealth of Generations: Mid-2024 Update
The Fed’s Distributional Financial Accounts have been updated with one more quarter of data, so here’s the latest update to the generational wealth chart: Not much has changed from last quarter, and...
View ArticleWhat Are the Effects of TCJA? It’s A Little Hard to Say
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was passed in late 2017 and went into effect in 2018. For academic research to analyze the effects, that’s still a very recent change, which can make analyzing the effects...
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Where Are The 7 Million Missing Men?
You may have heard that there are roughly 7 million men of working age that are not currently in the labor force — that is, not currently working or looking for work. The statistic has been produced...
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A Simple Presidential Election Model, Using Three Economic Variables
As the presidential race finishes out the last two weeks, it’s clearly a close race. In the past I have recommended prediction markets, and right now these are giving Trump about 60% odds. There have...
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Federal Spending in 2024 was $2.3 Trillion More Than 2019
In Fiscal Year 2019, the US federal government spent $4.45 trillion dollars. In Fiscal Year 2024, spending was $6.75 trillion, or an increase of $2.3 trillion dollars. If you adjusted the 2019 number...
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