Tuesday, November 25, 2014

Some of the hottest early Black Friday deals in the country are in Ferguson, Missouri


3Q2014 GDP revised up to 3.9% on surge in net exports (refined petroleum) and government spending (war on ISIS)

Today's second estimate of 3Q2014 real GDP surprised to the upside, rising to 3.9% from 3.5%. Consensus estimates had GDP declining to 3.3%.

Personal Consumption Expenditures contributed 1.51 points, hardly much above the average contribution for the three years 2011-2013 at 1.48. The people are spending about the same.

Likewise the contribution from Gross Private Domestic Investment was only slightly below average at .85 points. During the prior three years this had contributed to GDP annually on average just .94 points. So you could say investment activity is steady to declining.

No, the major contributions to GDP came from the huge reversals in net exports and government consumption expenditures. The former has contributed on average just .08 points annually 2011-2013, the latter -.45 annually. That's right, the net export category has been entirely inconsequential to GDP for the last three years, and that in a heretofore moribund dollar environment, while government spending has actually been a subtraction from annual GDP because the GOP takeover of the US House in 2010 arrested spending in its tracks.

But in today's report net exports contributed .78 points and government spending .76 points as  1) refined petroleum exports from the US shale boom help to pressure oil prices lower, making imported oil cheaper (imports thus are less of a subtraction from GDP at the same time), and as 2) the war on ISIS in Iraq and Syria ramps up military spending. Without those contributions to GDP and the other things being equal, growth was more like 2.36%.

Same old same old, except the dollar hit a 52 week high yesterday at 88.44. How long exports can help us in this rising dollar environment is anyone's guess, as is the tolerance of the American people for more spending on yet another foreign war.

Monday, November 24, 2014

How to stimulate the economy and deport illegal aliens in the United States at the same time

In 1954 the Eisenhower Administration employed 750 agents who rounded up and deported 1.1 million Mexicans illegally in the country in what was called Operation Wetback. It took them one year.

With full-time employment in the United States still flat on its back with 3 million fewer working full-time than at the 2007 peak at 123.2 million, there is a plentiful number of people here which could be usefully employed at the federal level in the effort to enforce current immigration law and help secure the border.

Those who say we could never round up 11 million illegals fail to appreciate that the ratio of the agents to the deported in 1954 was 1:1,466. A deportation force of 7,500 Americans employed by the federal government, therefore, should be able to round up and deport 11 million illegals today. And if you paid them $50,000 each, the cost to the Treasury would be less than a half billion dollars. Peanuts in a $4 trillion dollar government.

We just have to want to do it.

But why stop with just 11 million illegals when there may be as many as 30 million here illegally, from places like Ireland, France, Poland and you name it? Triple the budget to employ 23,000 and you could really start to clean the place up and restore law and order, once and for all, and JOBS.

We owe it to ourselves.