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bparksj28

Predicting re-elections: Follow the data | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/21564592

data economist elections prediction obama

shared by bparksj28 on 12 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • bparksj28 on 12 Oct 12
     
    Predicting Elections - interactice graph relating GDP, unemployment, and disposable income
bparksj28

The fiscal cliff may be overblown - The Term Sheet: Fortune's deals blog Term Sheet - 0 views

finance.fortune.cnn.com/...fiscal-cliff-2

cliff term

shared by bparksj28 on 09 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • By not going off the cliff, the CBO estimates that deficits over the next decade would rise by a total of $7.7 trillion (that's "trillion" with a "T"). That would bring the total national debt somewhere to around $24 trillion by 2023 which is equal to 90% of GDP (that's pretty high). If we go off the cliff, don't expect a clean slate, though, as the nation would still have a significant budget deficit equal to 58% of GDP in 2023 due to all the mandatory spending associated with the impeding explosion in costs emanating from Social Security and Medicare.
  • The cuts in spending and the increased taxes will cause thousands of people to lose their jobs pretty much overnight (millions of Americans owe their jobs directly or indirectly to federal government spending). This would push unemployment up across the country from 7.9% to 9.1%. As a result, the CBO projects that real GDP would drop by 0.5% in 2013 after growing by 2.1% in 2012. Real GDP would fall at an annual rate of 2.9% in the first half of next year, tipping the nation into a recession that the CBO figures would be similar in magnitude to the one the nation experienced following the first Persian Gulf War in the early 1990s (for those who didn't live through that, it was bad)
  • Indeed, the fiscal cliff is about as real of a problem as the nation's burgeoning national debt – it's theoretically bad, but it isn't bad enough for Washington to risk making the short term any more economically unpleasant than it has to be. After all, there will be elections for the House in just two short years, so neither side wants to go into that election cycle trying to defend why the government instituted growth killing spending cuts while allowing taxes to shoot up to address some arbitrary debt load that investors continue to fund for next to nothing
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  • The increase in federal taxes and the reductions in federal spending would cut the budget deficit (the difference between how much revenue the government takes in how much it spends) from $1.1 trillion last year to $641 billion in fiscal 2013, roughly a $500 billion cut. That represents a reduction in the budget deficit (as a percentage share of GDP) not seen since 1969 when the conservative Richard Nixon booted the free-spending Lyndon Johnson out of the White House
  • The increase in federal taxes and the reductions in federal spending would cut the budget deficit (the difference between how much revenue the government takes in how much it spends) from $1.1 trillion last year to $641 billion in fiscal 2013, roughly a $500 billion cut. That represents a reduction in the budget deficit (as a percentage share of GDP) not seen since 1969 when the conservative Richard Nixon booted the free-spending Lyndon Johnson out of the White Hous
  • It is therefore hard for politicians to so brazenly throw the nation into a deep recession to reduce spending when the benefits of acting are so intangible. The fact is that the Budget Control Act of 2011 was political theater in which the Republicans tried to appease "Tea Party" voters – a constituency that has basically been wiped out as the economy has improved. Discussions around raising the marginal tax rate on the top 2% are simply just political fodder. Indeed, multiple studies, including ones by the CBO say that it would raise an insignificant amount of money (a negative for the Democratic view) but would also cause no real harm to the economy (a negative for the Republican view). In the end, if it takes changing the top 2% rate from 35% to 39.6% to end this whole fiscal cliff charade, you can bet it has already been agreed to
  • s it may sound, it is simply irrational for either side to address the deficit in any meaningful way given how cheaply it is for Washington to borrow money. As we have seen in Europe, nations won't swallow the bitter pill of austerity unless the markets force them to
  • As cynical
bparksj28

Legalising marijuana: The view from Mexico | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...legalising-marijuana

marijuana view mexico economist

shared by bparksj28 on 06 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • AMERICAN elections are watched closely in Mexico, which sends most of its exports and about a tenth of its citizens north of the border.
  • On the same day, voters in Colorado, Oregon and Washington will vote on whether to legalise marijuana—not just for medical use, but for fun and profit.
  • he impact on Mexico could be profound. Between 40% and 70% of American pot is reckoned to be grown in Mexic
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • the American marijuana business brings in about $2 billion a year to Mexico’s drug traffickers.
  • That makes it almost as important to their business as the cocaine trade, which is worth about $2.4 billion.
  • Many Mexicans therefore wonder if America might consider a new approach. Felipe Calderon, the president, has said that if Americans cannot bring themselves to stop buying drugs, they ought to consider “market alternatives”, by which he means legalisation. Vicente Fox and Ernesto Zedillo, the two previous presidents of Mexico, have reached the same conclusion.
  • About 60,000 have been killed by organised crime during the past six years. Thousands more have disappeared.
  • In Mexico relatively few people take drugs. But many are murdered as a result of the export business.
  • Would Mexico’s bandits find themselves undercut by “El Cártel de Seattle”?
  • Mexico’s traffickers would lose about $1.4 billion of their $2 billion revenues from marijuana.
  • The cost of illegally transporting the drug adds about $500 per kilo for every thousand kilometres that the drug is hauled, it calculates, based on the fact that pot gets pricier the further you get from the Mexican border
  • So smuggling legal Washington dope to New York, for instance, would add about $1,900 to the cost of a kilo, giving a total wholesale price not much below $4,000.
  • That would make it more expensive than imported Mexican pot. But home-grown marijuana is much better quality than the Mexican sort. The content of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the part that gives you the giggles, is between 10% and 18%, whereas in Mexican pot it is only about 4% to 6%.
  • Once you adjust for quality, Washington pot would be about half the price of the Mexican stuff, even after it had made its expensive illegal journey to New York.
  • It calculates that the cost of growing marijuana legally is about $880 per kilo. Adding on a decent mark-up, plus the taxes that would be applied, it puts the wholesale price of Washington marijuana at just over $2,000 per kilo.
  • the Sinaloa “cartel” would lose up to half its total income,
  • . Exports of other drugs, from cocaine to methamphetamine, would become less competitive, as the traffickers’ fixed costs (from torturing rivals to bribing American and Mexican border officials) would remain unchanged, even as marijuana revenues fell.
  • Legalisation could, in short, deal a blow to Mexico’s traffickers of a magnitude that no current policy has got close to achieving. The stoned and sober alike should bear that in mind when they cast their votes on Tuesday.
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