Tag Archives: Statistics

Gary Kleck’s Vindication, 25 Years Late

Thursday, 26 April 2018 05:34

This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Wednesday, April 25, 2018:

Gary Kleck, professor of criminology who is now retired from Florida State University, and another professor at FSU, Marc Gertz, teamed up to do a study in the mid ’90s about how often Americans used firearms to defend themselves. The study was so carefully crafted that Marvin Wolfgang, acknowledged by the British Journal of Criminology as “the most influential criminologist in the English-speaking world,” was forced to admit its excellence:

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Jobs Report for March Beats Forecasters, Again

Thursday, 05 April 2018 04:53

Private-sector employment jumped by 241,000 jobs in March, beating February’s numbers and forecasters once again. This is the fifth straight month that the U.S. economy has added 200,000 jobs or more, and is far ahead of the paltry jobs growth recorded last September — just 80,000 new jobs that month. Forecasters were expecting just 200,000 new jobs as they anticipated that demand by employers would exceed available supply.

According to ADP/Moody’s Analytics,

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Trump’s Budget a Mixture of Hope, Optimistic Assumptions, and Statistics

Friday, 16 February 2018 06:55

This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Wednesday, February 14, 2018:

Mark Twain attributed his quote about statistics to British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli: “Figures often beguile me, particularly when I have the [freedom] of arranging them myself … there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

Mark Mulvaney, Trump’s OMB director, must feel the same way. There’s enough statistical smoke and mirrors in the president’s “An American Budget” to, in the words of Tevye [the dairyman in Fiddler on the Roof] “cross a Rabbi’s eyes.”

First, Mulvaney admits that this MAGA budget won’t balance, ever. The government is too big and growing too fast for the economy that funds it ever to catch up. So he and the president decided to ignore a balanced budget and go for the next best thing: show the economy growing faster than the government is growing and someday, eventually, the deficits will start to shrink when compared to the economy itself.

The numbers “prove” the conclusion: for fiscal year 2018 (which ends this coming September 30), government revenues of $3.3 trillion compared to government spending of $4.2 trillion will leave a gap – a deficit – of $873 billion, equivalent to 4.4 percent of the country’s gross domestic product. In the following years that annual deficit is projected to grow to $987 trillion in 2020, equivalent to 4.5 percent of the country’s GDP. Only by 2022 does that percentage begin to decline based on the assumption that government spending is only $4.9 trillion while tax receipts would hopefully be $4.1 trillion.

That is the crux of the new math in Trump’s budget:

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January Jobs Report: Is America Running Out of Workers?

Wednesday, 07 February 2018 06:35

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, February 5, 2018:

The headline numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ jobs report released on Friday once again caught forecasters by surprise: Predicting job growth of 177,000 for January, they got instead 200,000 — the 88th month in a row of positive job growth, with many recent months where the economy outperformed forecasters.

The other number also caught them by surprise:

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Economist Mark Zandi Exposes His Statist Worldview

Tuesday, 09 January 2018 06:13

This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Monday, January 8, 2018:

Mark Zandi should be embarrassed. Not because he is an establishment economist. Not because he is a Keynesian. And not because he’s not a smart guy. He should be embarrassed that someone allowed him to publish nonsense about the state of the economy in order to promote his worldview.

He lives in a world that is behaving much differently than he expected or than he apparently wants. He wants the Trump tax reform law to fail. He must admit that the economy is working much better than he ever expected it to. But, in the end, he says that it’s all a mirage, temporary, that the resurgence measured by nearly every metric isn’t going to last.

He is establishment to the core, and perhaps that’s why he’s willing to go to the mat for a worldview that is being overturned and increasingly discredited: that statists can control things much better than an uncontrolled “free” economy can.

He admitted in an article for CNBC that things are going just swimmingly:

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The New York Times Masks the Truth in Venezuela

Friday, 22 December 2017 05:27

This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Wednesday, December 20, 2017:

After five months and 5,000 words, the journalists at the New York Times refused to use the word “socialism” as the cause of the horrors they uncovered in Venezuela. Instead, Venezuela’s problems are the result of years of “economic mismanagement” instead.

What they found was horrific, and more than sufficient to prove the point: socialism destroys, maims, and kills. Its worst atrocities are inflicted on the defenseless: the elderly and the very young. The intrepid journalists focused on the latter, and what they found was predictable and heartrending: babies in Venezuela are dying of malnutrition at rates seen only in refugee and concentration camps. Emergency rooms are filled to overflowing by mothers with starving infants at their breasts while others are being turned away. Doctors told the journos that children arrive at the hospitals weighing the same as when they were born. Infant mortality rates are soaring, and there’s little doctors can do about it. Said the authors: “The statistics that have come out are staggering. In the Ministry of Health’s 2015 report, the mortality rate for children under four weeks old had increased a hundredfold [while] maternal mortality had increased nearly fivefold.”

Matt Vespa suffers under no such confusion about the cause of what’s happening there:

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Many Surprises in Latest Jobless Claims Report

Friday, 20 October 2017 05:51

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Thursday, October 19, 2017:

The first surprise from the latest jobless claims statistics is that new claims for unemployment insurance benefits last week fell to the lowest level in 44 years, according to the Department of Labor (DOL): “The advance figure … was 222,000 … the lowest level for initial claims since March 31, 1973.”

The second surprise is that the number of continuing claims (those lasting more than a week) also fell to levels not seen since 1974.

The third surprise is

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Jobs Report Shows Remarkable Economic Resiliency After Hurricanes

Saturday, 07 October 2017 06:15

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Friday, October 6, 2017:

Even the headline was positive. Despite losing 200,000 jobs temporarily due to Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, the American economy’s growth elsewhere all but made up for them. The Labor Department reported a net 33,000 jobs loss in September, the first negative number since 2010.

Other signs of economic strength were revealed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS):

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Gun Violence Stats Altered by Washington Post: 23 “Children” Shot Daily

Tuesday, 26 September 2017 05:52

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, September 25, 2017:

In a wildly sensationalist screed published September 15, the Washington Post burnished its anti-gun agenda without regard to truth. In its “Children Under Fire” piece, the Post seemed to rely on emotional appeals in order to make its point: Youngsters are being shot at a terrible rate and something must be done! The reader is left to imagine just what must be done, but it’s likely to have little to do with supporting the Second Amendment.

Its subtitle warned the skeptic what was coming:

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Washington Post’s Credibility Takes Another Hit

Tuesday, 26 September 2017 05:35

This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Monday, September 25, 2017:

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Two recent polls show once again that the mainstream media’s attempt to influence the news isn’t working. For years Gallup has been tracking their cratering of credibility, noting last September that “Americans’ trust and confidence in the mass media ‘to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly’ has dropped to its lowest level in Gallup polling history, with [just] 32% saying they have a great deal or fair amount of trust in the media. This is down eight percentage points from last year.”

Gallup’s conclusions were backed up by a more recent poll conducted by Harvard-Harris in May this year which learned that

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Anti-gun Researcher Frightened by How Many Guns Americans Own

Wednesday, 06 September 2017 05:51

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Tuesday, September 5, 2017:

The virulently anti-gun group The Trace sent an e-mail blast to its members last week, alerting them to what it said was the danger of an overly and unnecessarily armed American citizenry:

Jennifer Mascia [a member of “TeamTrace”] pulled some numbers from the Small Arms Survey, which gauges gun stockpiles in the hands of civilians, law enforcement, and militaries around the world. She found that with an estimated 270 million firearms owned by everyday Americans, civilians own 70 times more weapons that all police and military services combined.

Mascia is an editorial assistant at the New York Times and was a regular contributor to its anti-gun column “The Gun Report” until it was shut down in 2014. Her source, the Small Arms Survey, is an international anti-gun group purporting to provide accurate statistics on all aspects of private gun ownership worldwide. Unfortunately, its reputation for accuracy has been tainted, with much of its reporting being challenged as “misleading or just plain wrong.”

In this instance, however, the numbers Mascia dug up from the outfit actually understated the “concerns” she expressed about how many firearms are owned by those “everyday Americans.” The real number isn’t 270 million — not even close — but is at least

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Robots May Take 2/3 of Las Vegas Service Jobs

Tuesday, 11 July 2017 05:40

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, July 10, 2017:

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Two college professors from the University of Redlands, California, looked at the occupations at the highest risk of being automated or replaced by robots, analyzed 100 American cities with working populations over 250,000, and listed those cities most at risk. They included Bakersfield and Riverside, California; El Paso, Texas; and at the top of the list, Las Vegas. The professors predict that over the next two decades, at the present rate that robots are replacing workers, 65 percent of the jobs in Las Vegas will be done by robots.

They will include robots

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When Will the Luddites Ever Learn?

Tuesday, 11 July 2017 05:25

This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Monday, July 10, 2017:

Rage Against the Machine

Rage Against the Machine

Two Oxford University professors, Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, wrote back in 2013 that the robotic revolution would overtake and virtually displace human workers in broad expanses of U.S. industry. Those occupations most at risk include loan officers (98 percent chance of being replaced by a robot), receptionists and information clerks (96 percent), paralegals and legal assistants (94 percent), retail sales people (92 percent), taxi drivers and chauffeurs (89 percent), and fast food cooks (81 percent).

At the bottom of the list are elementary school teachers and physicians and surgeons (0.4 percent chance), lawyers (4 percent), musicians and singers (7 percent), and reporters and correspondents (11 percent).

They found that almost half of those currently employed in the United States were in their “high risk” category, defined as jobs that could be automated “relatively soon, perhaps over the next decade or two.”

Two other college professors, this time from the University of Redlands, California, decided to take the Oxford study and apply it to American cities with more than 250,000 workers. They concluded that

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Robots and Kiosks (and Amazon) are Making Jobs Reports Irrelevant

Saturday, 08 July 2017 05:32

This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Friday, July 7, 2017:

MarketWatch

MarketWatch

Malcolm Frank is one of those rarest of futurists: He sees what’s coming and writes clearly about what to do about it. In his What to do When Machines do Everything: How to get Ahead in a World of AI, Algorithms, Bots and Big Data, Frank discusses the massive upheavals businesses are going through as they try to keep up and stay profitable.

One issue he doesn’t discuss is how to measure the new economy’s output.

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Jobs Market Getting Tighter, Says ADP

Friday, 07 July 2017 05:24

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Thursday, July 6, 2017:

At first blush the jobs report from ADP, the data-processing firm that works with Moody’s Analytics in developing its monthly review, looked disappointing. Economists had expected 185,000 new jobs created in June but instead they got just 158,000. Further, both estimates and ADP were well below the 230,000 new jobs number reported for May.

A closer look behind the headlines reveals a startling fact:

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Pew Research: Americans Getting More Comfortable With Firearm Ownership

Saturday, 24 June 2017 05:34

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Friday, June 23, 2017:

Pew Research Center’s latest in-depth report on what it calls “America’s Complex Relationship with Guns” is revelatory. According to the report, released on Thursday, Americans are becoming more and more comfortable with guns and gun ownership, and less and less enchanted with more gun laws to fight perceived gun violence.

When 3,390 U.S adults were polled in March and April, they were asked whether it was more important to protect gun rights or to control gun ownership. In the year 2000, two-thirds of those polled then favored more gun control. Today, that has dropped to less than half,

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Venezuela’s Bonds Selling at Massive Discounts for Fear of Default

Friday, 09 June 2017 05:23

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Thursday, June 8, 2017:

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When it was learned that Goldman Sachs had purchased $2.8 billion of Venezuela’s bonds for just $865 million — a 69-percent discount — the firm received criticism from opponents of Venezuela President Nicolas Maduro (shown). The critics claimed that by buying them, even at such a fire sale price, Goldman allowed Maduro to pay some critical bills that kept his corrupt Marxist regime afloat for a little while longer.

Now comes word that Maduro has resorted to desperation financing — what the Wall Street Journal calls “unorthodox” — by issuing bonds to one of its state-owned banks, which then

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Aetna Next to Leave Connecticut for Better Business Climate

Wednesday, 07 June 2017 05:41

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Tuesday, June 6, 2017:

Aetna Insurance Company and Aetna National Ban...

Aetna Insurance Company and Aetna National Bank, Hartford, Conn, from Robert N. Dennis collection of stereoscopic views

Aetna, the $50 billion health insurer that has had its headquarters in Hartford, Connecticut, since 1853, confirmed rumors last week that it was looking to move out of state. The company said, “We are in negotiations with several states regarding a headquarters relocation, with the goal of broadening our access to innovation and the talent that will fill knowledge-economy type positions … and hope to have a final resolution by early summer.”

Hartford’s Mayor Luke Bronin expressed his disappointment:

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AG Sessions Requests Delay in Implementing Baltimore PD’s Consent Decree

Wednesday, 05 April 2017 06:01

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Tuesday, April 4, 2017:

Eight days before the end of the Obama administration, Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced the final approval of an agreement allowing the Department of Justice to meddle in the affairs of the Baltimore Police Department. It only required approval from a judge for the agreement to become cemented into place.

Trump’s new attorney general, Jeff Sessions, asked the judge, U.S. District Judge James Bredar, to delay making his decision for 90 days so that the Justice Department, now operating under new guidelines from the president, could have time to “review and assess” it before its implementation.

The request came just hours after Sessions issued a memorandum to his department’s lawyers to “ensure” that any such consent decrees

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Friday’s Jobs Report Confirms Wednesday’s Blowout Numbers

Saturday, 11 March 2017 06:49

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Friday, March 10, 2017:

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The Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) confirmed the robust employment numbers reported by ADP/Moody’s on Wednesday: 235,000 new jobs were created in President Donald Trump’s first full month in office, with the unemployment rate dropping further, to 4.7 percent. Just as reported by ADP, the BLS report showed strong growth in construction, manufacturing, and mining, representing nearly a third of the jobs created in January.

Friday’s report also exceeded Wall Street economists’ expectations,

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