Corporate tax deadbeats
Biden and Congressional Democrats are talking about raising the corporate tax rate. The latest proposal looks to be boosting it from 21.0% to 26.5%, marked down from the 28.0% level that the administration circulated in April. While that would be a step in the right direction, it only begins to address the seven-decade erosion in what business pays. Graphed below is the effective tax rate for nonfinancial corporations, drawn from the national income accounts. “Effective” means the rate actually paid—taxes paid divided by profits—not the rate on the books before clever lawyers… Read More
The hits keep coming
Goldman Sachs attracted a lot of attention with its forecast that US GDP will be off 34% in the second quarter of this year. That is a very big number. It’s three-and-a-half times the worst quarter in US economic history since quarterly GDP stats began in 1947. (That quarter, by the way, was the first of 1958, the onset of a sharp recession, which featured, among other things, an “Asian flu.”) Here’s a little perspective on that number. That 34% figure is annualized, meaning it’s what the total decline would amount to… Read More
Misreading the latest jobs numbers
Z Communications’ resident statistician Jack Rasmus is out with some fresh disinformation about the economic news. It’s been a while since I took his nonsense apart, so this seems like a good opportunity, since his latest looks to be making the rounds. The problems start in the first paragraph (Rasmus is in quoted italics, my comments in Roman.) The just released report on April jobs on first appearance, heavily reported by the media, shows a record low 3.6% unemployment rate and another month of 263,000 new jobs created. But there are two… Read More
About that stock panic
Stock markets have stabilized, at least for now, after a few days of what the press likes to call “turmoil.” What does it all mean? There’s no doubt that stocks have been due for a comeuppance for some time: they’re very expensive. Since stocks represent claims on corporate profits, present and future, the conventional way to value them is by measuring their price against those underlying profits (or “earnings” in Wall Street lingo, since to the owning class, profits from capital are just like wages for labor: as they like to say,… Read More
How employed are we?
A few weeks ago, I made fun of Sean Spicer for this word salad: I think there’s a question between the total number of people that are employed, and the President’s comments in the past have reflected that his big concern was getting to the bottom of how many people are working in this country, and that the denominator—meaning the percentage rate of the total number of people—is not the most accurate reflection of how many people are employed in this country. And, God knows, he deserves a strong dose of mockery…. Read More
GDP etc. in a deep funk
By the way, here’s a graph of actual real U.S. GDP and its major components relative to their long-term (1970–2007) trendlines through the end of 2013. Note how things fell off a cliff in the recession. GDP, consumption, and government spending are all about 15% below where they’d be had they continued to grow in line with their long-term trend. (The hysteria over out-of-control government spending looks ludicrous in the light of this graph.) Investment is about 25% below where it “should” be. thanks largely to the housing collapse, though it’s staging… Read More
LBO News from Doug Henwood 