Adrian Nesta

Isn't this for IVs and not NIVs? I might have misread the piece.

The other thing is that people perceive transit/healthcare as "welfare" in opposition to growth when really the inability to build lots of good infrastructure or keep life expectancy up are *drags* on US economic growth

You undoubtedly have a more well researched perspective into it than I do so I'm sure I'd learn more from of your thinking on it. I assumed we'd need to do something like your latter suggestion eventually. I also thought there are ways to smooth out a VAT to be ~proportional or slightly progressive.

That makes sense. Of course there's a variety of factors but my prior is that absent major pop growth/immigration and given the aging demo profile and higher propensity of HC consumption it would be hard to pencil out substantial expansions of social programs just through raising the $600K rate.

I'm as excited about Claude Code / Opus 4.5 as anyone.

It's helped me create things this year that I couldn't have done otherwise.

But I notice often it lacks "common sense."

Meaning, it makes decisions that "work" but shouldn't be made.

This whole thread 💯

It is certainly erroneous to group HHs in that part of the distribution with the ~95+%ile portion which as you mention is a more meaningful cut point in the distribution. I guess I am trying to draw almost three distinctions more for political reasons rather than purely mathematical ones.

HHs between the ~67th to ~90th/95th income %tile need to pay somewhat higher taxes for the gov't to have the revenue for the policies to make the US a (imo) more just *and* economically dynamic place. I have a fear this becomes more difficult to do if these HHs are defined as "middle class".

Totally, and this makes sense as a framework statistically. (Kind of makes me want to dive into the SCF microdata and flesh it out a bit more). I realize this is kind of semantic but I'm getting hung up on it for a particular reason:

I know you are certainly aware of this but folks in that income bracket are also more likely to possess other types of economic levers and assets which might not show up on the HH W-2 or even balance sheet but exacerbate this distribution.

I've been thinking about this a lot and I agree it's necessary to update priors but find the idea "my HH makes ~$200k and I am ~middle class" is still pervasive.

While "rich" & "middle class" are of course nebulous I still believe that HHs in the 80th percentile are better described by the former.

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Your periodic reminder that you have the right to find out why your health insurer denied your claim.

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I'm not sure how it works in Canada but for the BLS I believe the employment rate is just (1 - unemployment rate) i.e. (# employed / labor force) and the EPR is the (# employed / civilian noninstitutional pop). So different denominators.

Very cool, thank you! The comparison table is incredibly helpful. Are there vignettes any of the functions?

Reminds me of this apparently real thing from awhile back.

my stance has always been that we have an economy so as to have people, and arguments that we need to make people to have an economy are silly

I had a similar jolt when I stumbled on something the CDC published from ~the turn of the century.

bsky.app/profile/just...

A chart from FRED of the change in Food Away from Home, Shelter, Food at Home, Services Less Rent, Recreation, and Alcoholic Beverages from the CPI and average hourly earnings of private sector production & nonsupervisory employees from the establishment survey from January 2019 to September 2025.

I don't disagree. I will note that it's somewhat striking how different this picture looks if you start the base period two years earlier. fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgr...

Roger Ailes, TikTok, and the Glonzofication of America

Reminds me of this very insightful game from @davidawaldron.bsky.social www.waldrn.com/partisan-hack/

This is now well over 10 years old but it's a well written, digestible, more theoretical overview that I really did find helpful to clarify it for me.

think-like-a-git.net

I have seen this everywhere too. Did you ever find out more about Moody's data source? I'm curious what specific types of consumption that skews towards lower-income consumers their sample might be under-representing (and why).

Millennial Homeownership Still Lagging Behind Previous Generations Millennials are buying homes at a lower rate than generations before, with high housing prices, the lack of entry-level homes, and the dearth of new builds particularly impacting millennials.

I had a piece a few years ago with a similar cut of CPS ASEC data. Really striking how deleterious the GFC was (and to a lesser extent how much a boon pre-'22 Covid was)
www.investopedia.com/millennial-h...

Yeah his vice was dip and not alcohol.

🐐

Before I led BLS I was not as acutely aware of how many businesses, firms, and individual jobs depend on a stream of public use data. One estimate is that the $2 billion the US spends on economic data creates a $200+ billion industry of 'data-intensive' businesses. pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/...

Omg!! I also have been passing extra date component strings to `paste0()` for years. Lubricate truly is a gift that keeps on giving.

Just registered. I'm looking forward to it!

Thank you for posting. Just put in an application!

First, well, yeah that is always what the GOP proposes. We'll need to raise revenue by a third or cut benefits by a quarter to provide the trust fund with another 75 years of "solvency." Not surprising the GOP wants poor people to bear the cost. But I want to dig in a bit here.