Inflation is progressive utopians encountering resource constraints for the first time.
W.C. Varones
Someday the mountain might get him but the law never will
4.23.2022
4.08.2022
Taxable brokerage vs. traditional 401(k) account
The common wisdom says pre-tax 401(k)s and IRAs beat taxable accounts hands-down. But it's not so clear to me. If you put buy-and-hold stocks or index funds in a taxable brokerage account, it's actually remarkably tax-efficient because of the ability to defer capital gains, and the preferable tax rates on dividends and capital gains.
Here's a spreadsheet where you can play with the assumptions (you'll have to make a copy for yourself to edit): link.
Yes, traditional beats taxable in simplified base case, but this ignores:
- tax loss harvesting
- HIFO withdrawals
- foreign tax credits
- higher potential future tax rates
1.10.2022
10.30.2021
CDC reached completely unsupported conclusion to downplay natural immunity, support mandates
The CDC announced a study showing that "vaccination offers higher protection than previous COVID-19 infection."
The study shows no such thing. In fact, the data considered in the study aren't sufficient to even attempt to make such a conclusion.
The media gleefully and unquestioningly repeated the CDC's nonsense.
In case I get banned from Twitter for questioning "The Science," here are the tweets:
For example, the vaccinated people skew much older than the recovered in this study. If, as seems obvious, older people tend to go to the hospital more with non-Covid respiratory illnesses than young people do, that would explain this data. Yet the CDC insists this says something about Covid natural immunity instead.
Or if some people went to the hospital due to side effects from the vaccine. "See," the CDC claims, "that improves the ratio and proves vaccines are better than natural immunity!"
Others have pointed out that the 90-179 day post-vaccination window seems cherry-picked to maximize favorable outcomes for the vaccine, as the Israeli and other studies have shown vaccine efficacy drops off significantly after that period. And others have pointed out the tiny sample size of recovered people who were hospitalized and tested positive (i.e. it's both extremely rare for natural immunity to fail, and it's bad science to try to draw conclusions!). And Thomas Massie points out that they are counting “long Covid” as re-infections which might very well explain most of the cases in the study!
This is obviously a politically ordered result to support Biden's vaccine mandate push. The fact that they couldn't come up with a supportable conclusion is telling.
10.08.2021
More stuff that broke around 1971
We've noted before that a bunch of economic trends turned bad when Nixon closed the gold window and we launched into the current pure fiat experiment: commodity volatility, labor share of productivity gains, wealth inequality, etc.
Here's another one courtesy of Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution:
In Launching the Innovation Renaissance I said that “If total factor productivity had continued to grow at its 1957 to 1973 rate then we today would be living in the world of 2076 rather than in the world of 2014.” Sadly, the future is continuing to recede. Consider the graph below. If growth had continued at the rate expected by the CBO in 2005 then we today would be living in the world of 2037 rather than in the world of 2021. (n.b. I am eyeballing.)
10.03.2021
Rand Paul educates Javier Baccaria on the science
9.05.2021
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Body Count goes to Vegas! Ernest Scherer III was a Vegas loser who fancied himself a professional poker player. Doesn't that photo t...
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UPDATE: Edited to remove the guy's name. I hope nobody harasses him or his employer. He was good-natured and his sign was innocuous a...
Quotations from Chairman Varones
Inflation is progressive utopians encountering resource constraints for the first time.
Interesting that the break in productivity growth happened at the time we went off the gold standard.
Is there a causal relationship either way? Did we stop becoming productive because it was easy to get rich buying levered assets with a depreciating currency? Or did we devalue the currency because we ran out of productivity growth?
UPDATE: Edward Snowden and Jack Dorsey are noticing too. And there's a web site dedicated to it: wtfhappenedin1971.com