Hope and Fear – Part I: Year of Promise - Eric Janszen

[charliebrown]

Re: Stable credit and money supply vs 12%/year

count the number of employed, not unemployed, and compare this to the population. I am using the bls own numbers of full time, part time, and self employed.
Right now I am getting 46% employment. Unfortunately I do not have numbers pre-crisis. I started doing this only after i learned the u6 numbers were junk also. 2010 the reading was 45%. I don't care if your looking for work or not. The workers must support the the non-workers and pay the bills.

I cannot count the shadow workers. I know two in my small sphere of aquantenances. A handy man and an home computer fixer guy. Both guys make around
$100 - $200 bucks per day. If they had to pay taxes they could not make ends meet.

[BadJuju]

Re: Stable credit and money supply vs 12%/year

I cannot count the shadow workers. I know two in my small sphere of aquantenances. A handy man and an home computer fixer guy. Both guys make around
$100 - $200 bucks per day. If they had to pay taxes they could not make ends meet.

That's a lot of money to me. If you can't make ends meet with that, then you've done something wrong along the way.

[NCR85]

Re: Stable credit and money supply vs 12%/year

count the number of employed, not unemployed, and compare this to the population. I am using the bls own numbers of full time, part time, and self employed.
Right now I am getting 46% employment. Unfortunately I do not have numbers pre-crisis. I started doing this only after i learned the u6 numbers were junk also. 2010 the reading was 45%. I don't care if your looking for work or not. The workers must support the the non-workers and pay the bills.

I cannot count the shadow workers. I know two in my small sphere of aquantenances. A handy man and an home computer fixer guy. Both guys make around
$100 - $200 bucks per day. If they had to pay taxes they could not make ends meet.

The unemployment/population ratio is useful, yes, but it gives skeptics some leeway to claim that a large part of the fall is due to baby boomer retirees. The analyses I cited earlier show that only 24 to 33% of labor force dropouts can reasonably be attributed to factors not related to the recession. The rest is cyclical.

[ProdigyofZen]

Re: Stable credit and money supply vs 12%/year

I wonder how many have turned to the underground economy. There's tons of work that goes undocumented out there. And it can be very profitable.

This is where all the Euro skeptics get it wrong. They don't realize the amount of work that is conducted in the underground economy in places like Greece and Spain. I can imagine that close to 30% of the population makes a respectable living in the underground economy.

Cuba is the same way even within a communist state.

[jk]

Re: Stable credit and money supply vs 12%/year

count the number of employed, not unemployed, and compare this to the population. I am using the bls own numbers of full time, part time, and self employed.
Right now I am getting 46% employment. Unfortunately I do not have numbers pre-crisis. I started doing this only after i learned the u6 numbers were junk also. 2010 the reading was 45%. I don't care if your looking for work or not. The workers must support the the non-workers and pay the bills.

I cannot count the shadow workers. I know two in my small sphere of aquantenances. A handy man and an home computer fixer guy. Both guys make around
$100 - $200 bucks per day. If they had to pay taxes they could not make ends meet.

be careful about changing demographics. you might want to do it by age group, if possible. otherwise increasing boomer retirements [whether voluntary or involuntary] will skew your numbers.

[charliebrown]

Re: Stable credit and money supply vs 12%/year

in my area that is barely scraping by. You are lucky to find an apartment for $800 a month, and this is an apartment I wouldn't want anyone who I cared about living in (high crime). I suppose you could find a room mate. That $100-$200 isn't every day either. more like 2 - 3 weeks per month. I know things are cheaper down south, but I could not conceive of living on 15K a year here. both these guys needs cars to do their jobs too. One has some of his wages garnished by the medical complex. He has to pay them $100 a month for some ER care. He will be paying that off for the next decade.

[Polish_Silver]

Re: Stable credit and money supply vs 12%/year

Niall ferguson claims the number of "disabled" people covered by FICA has gone way up under Obama.
So they are not counted as "unemployed". You need to look at number of people 18-65 vs number employed in that age group.

[Onlooker]

Re: Stable credit and money supply vs 12%/year

That's a lot of money to me. If you can't make ends meet with that, then you've done something wrong along the way.

You can't possibly come to that conclusion honestly without a whole lot more information. Context matters.

[Slimprofits]

Re: Stable credit and money supply vs 12%/year



http://cwcs.ysu.edu/resources/cwcs-projects/defacto

Definitions:


Officially Unemployed- Persons who worked less than one hour during the nationally determined reference period (one week), looked for during this period, and were available for work during this period.

Latent Job Candidates

Marginally attached workers – Persons not in the labor force who want and are available for work and who have looked for a job sometime in prior 12 months (or since the end of their last job if they held one within the past 12 months), but were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the four weeks preceding the survey.
Discouraged workers – Persons not in labor force who want, are available for a job and who have looked for work sometime in the past 12 months (or since the end of their last job if they held one within the past 12 months)

Underemployed –Persons who would like to work full-time but are not able to do so for economic reasons such as unavailability of full-time work or reduced demand for hours by current employer.

Excess disability – Persons who are excluded from labor force because of sick leave or early retirement. This number is growing as people are increasingly taking early social security.

Government Programs – Persons receiving government subsidized or government provided programs. For example, low wage workers receiving Earned Income Tax Credits.

Prison and Jail Populations – Persons not in labor force because of incarceration. In a recent issue of Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, reported that 400,000 people were incarcerated in 1975 and that this year the number would grow to 2,500,000. Put differently, a 625% increase in 35 years.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Hope and Fear – Part I: Year of Promise - Eric Janszen

There's a lot to digest here. Thank you for it.

My one gripe is the class war rhetoric. A marginal 2-4% income tax rate change seems to me to be lightyears away from molotov cocktails burning on the streets of Greenwich and Weston. It seems to me that comparing slight income tax adjustments to the October Revolution is how we end up in this paralyzed political mess we've gotten ourselves into where nothing can change.

[EJ]

Re: Hope and Fear – Part I: Year of Promise - Eric Janszen

There's a lot to digest here. Thank you for it.

My one gripe is the class war rhetoric. A marginal 2-4% income tax rate change seems to me to be lightyears away from molotov cocktails burning on the streets of Greenwich and Weston. It seems to me that comparing slight income tax adjustments to the October Revolution is how we end up in this paralyzed political mess we've gotten ourselves into where nothing can change.

"Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich by promising to protect each from the other."
- Oscar Ameringer (1870-1943)

Obama may be the best such artist in a generation or maybe he is taking it too far.

[Chris Coles]

Re: Stable credit and money supply vs 12%/year

http://cwcs.ysu.edu/resources/cwcs-projects/defacto

Definitions:


Officially Unemployed- Persons who worked less than one hour during the nationally determined reference period (one week), looked for during this period, and were available for work during this period.

Latent Job Candidates

Marginally attached workers – Persons not in the labor force who want and are available for work and who have looked for a job sometime in prior 12 months (or since the end of their last job if they held one within the past 12 months), but were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the four weeks preceding the survey.
Discouraged workers – Persons not in labor force who want, are available for a job and who have looked for work sometime in the past 12 months (or since the end of their last job if they held one within the past 12 months)

Underemployed –Persons who would like to work full-time but are not able to do so for economic reasons such as unavailability of full-time work or reduced demand for hours by current employer.

Excess disability – Persons who are excluded from labor force because of sick leave or early retirement. This number is growing as people are increasingly taking early social security.

Government Programs – Persons receiving government subsidized or government provided programs. For example, low wage workers receiving Earned Income Tax Credits.

Prison and Jail Populations – Persons not in labor force because of incarceration. In a recent issue of Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, reported that 400,000 people were incarcerated in 1975 and that this year the number would grow to 2,500,000. Put differently, a 625% increase in 35 years.

Thanks for this info Slimprofits. So we can assume that if we take Bart's opinion, (that every percentage point relates to 1.5 million unemployed), then these figures take us to 42.4 million unemployed or must be replaced as with the bloat within government spending programs, shown here as ~ 6 million but which others have suggested accounts for at least another 10 million jobs that must now be replaced with fully funded private sector jobs.

I am also going to add this comment to the Select thread.

My question is, does anyone here have any idea of the equivalent studies for the United Kingdom?

[bpwoods]

Re: Hope and Fear – Part I: Year of Promise - Eric Janszen

EJ, thanks for that long piece. I understood most, but there were a few bits I found puzzling - I will have to read again and think about them. There is one nitpick that I would like to take up. It relates to your attribution to GRG55 about the effect of taxes on motor fuels, tobacco products and work. I'm not asserting the entire quip is slam-dunk wrong - but it is quite problematical, especially the part about work -which is flat wrong. I'll come back to this.

People will listen to you. They will heed what you say. You have form. One downside of this is that you have to be a mite careful about your comments, and that quip falls into the 'be careful' category. However, "stuff happens". Its like one of the inhabitants of Pandora's box. Once released, it can never be re-captured and shut up.

Consumer expenditures on domestic transport fuel is, part inelastic, part discretionary. Its easy to 'tax', and increasing the tax does lead to a reduction in traveling - at the margin! The tax is highly regressive - its not income related. Here in Europe, high transport fuel duties has the effect of getting auto manufacturers to produce fuel-efficient, four-cylinder engines. Despite this the proportion of miles traveled in different countries varies considerably. Its less in countries with well developed, highly integrated public transport networks, higher in countries with less developed networks.

The matter of tobacco product consumption immediately runs into the little problem of the highly addictive nature of one of the active ingredients. I seem to recall that some CEOs of tobacco companies had a run-in with the US Senate over the 'addition' of nicotine to some of their brands. Now, I wonder why? Anyways, I do not smoke, so I'm indifferent to any increase in tobacco duty (which is also a highly regressive tax) - but not so some members of my family! When our government increases tobacco duties -they have an initial 'come-to-Jesus' moment and either quit or reduce. But the 'way-of-the-flesh' .... ... You get the picture. The one government initiative that has reduced tobacco consumption is mandating the poor sods smoke outdoors! Outdoor activity might be fine in some southern parts, but here in Ireland its can be a tad drafty, cold and wet.

Now the 'work' matter. As I asserted above, the idea that increasing taxes on waged-labour actually incentives persons to 'work less' is junk. The empirical evidence refuting this is available in peer reviewed journals. So anyone whose particularly interested in Labour Economics can follow it up. The primary focus question that all need to ask is: "Why do folk have to engage in waged-labour?" In some cases it is hardly for the good of their healths! They need to live; to eat; to raise families; to house themselves; to cloth themselves; to educate themselves: to equip themselves (they need to be fit and able to engage in waged-labour) - and, this is rarely mentioned, to have something over after all costs have been settled: they have to have 'a Life'. What's so hard to understand here? A great deal it seems.

If some contributor wishes to raise the matter of Welfare Transfers - again, they need to start with that inconvenient focus question; "Why do folk need an income?". It sure as hell is not as simplistic as I have sketched above.

Again, thanks for your article. Best wishes to you and all on iTulip.

Brian

[Polish_Silver]

tax vs work hours in Asia, europe

BP,
I also questioned that assertion about income taxes reducing work.
I remember discussing this with a silicon valley friend, and we both had the impression that, without income taxes, MANY of the succesful engineers would have chosen to retire in the late 1990's, but had to keep working because the taxes took so much of their money.
(of course, with larger take home pay, the life styles and housing costs might have escalated greatly as well--many just spend, rather than save, no matter how high their income is.)

Over all, though, I do see this pattern:

Asia lowest taxes, longest working hours (japan, korea, etc)
Europe: highest taxes, shortest working hours
North america: intermediate taxes and working hours.

[bpwoods]

Re: tax vs work hours in Asia, europe

Polish, thanks for that comment. As I alluded to toward the end of my piece, the situation is complex and confounding. What needs to be known (and I doubt it can be validly measured) are the respective levels of sectoral productivities; living costs; state transfer payments; health care and education provision, etc., etc. My principle gripe is with the quip. Its too broad and too open to contentious arguments. However, stuff happens! It may well be the truth (which we can never know - but can approach with some level of statistical uncertainty) that when all known artifacts are removed, that higher taxes on waged-labour do in fact cause folk (in aggregate) to spend less hours working.

Thanks again. Brian.