Chanting Points Memo: The Dayton Economy Just Keeps Getting Better And Better!

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Just keep repeating it to yourself, DFLers; the Dayton economy is awesome!

The Dayton economy is awesome!

The Dayton economy is awesome!

Housing starts are off 15 percent in August (the full story appeared on MPR last night – but naturally isn’t available online today):

Confidence in the local homebuilding market took a hit in August, as permits for new single-family houses declined 15 percent from a year ago and permits for new multifamily units were down 78 percent. 

And the price of farm land – one of the key indicators and drivers of the farm economy – is slipping in Minnesota.  But hey, at least they’ll be getting taxed more for it…

 

54 thoughts on “Chanting Points Memo: The Dayton Economy Just Keeps Getting Better And Better!”

  1. The multifamily housing stat is horrible. Since apartments are the choice of (a) people just starting out and (b) the retired for reasons of cost, security, and maintenance, what this stat tells us is that there’s evidence that entry level jobs are drying up, and oldsters are fleeing the state. Ouch.

  2. Yes, our ship is sinking, but not as fast as that one over there.

    Cue Democrats’ Wisconsin comparison in 5… 4…3…

  3. Just learned last week that a company with about 50 manufacturing and roughly 75 total jobs in a Northern Suburb is heading across the St Croix this fall.
    It will be interesting to drill into the numbers when (and especially if) this information gets released to see where Minnesota falls.
    http://ilnews.org/2780/irs-dragging-feet-in-release-of-inter-state-migration-data/
    Maybe we’ll be able to say (to paraphrase Ricky) “Alida, you got some ‘splainin to do”.

  5. Comparing tax receipts to housing starts is not apt, Emery.
    The article you link to was outrageously biased. AP writers belong to the Newspaper Guild union. It’s pretty militant. It would be great if they would put a disclaimer after the “AP” tag.
    Perhaps the if the AP reporter knew how to be a journalist, he would let us know where the shortfall was, and what the actual amount of receipts was. Most of it came from state income tax and corporate income tax, FYI.
    The WI Sept. of Revenue thinks thata 2% variance is a reasonable offset from projection.
    Buried in the eleventh paragraph:
    “The two-year budget passed by the Republican-controlled Legislature and signed by Walker in 2013 ended the first year with a $724 million surplus. But with Thursday’s shortfall, than cushion is now just $443 million.”

  8. Are you kidding? You are linking back to the same AP article — the article that is both biased and uninformative?
    I already found the link to wispolitics and mentioned the data in my comment.
    I cannot understand how you believe that you can make a direct comparison between housing starts (impacts future economic activity) in one state and tax receipts (measure of past economic activity) in another state. That’s a Krugman-style analysis, meaning it makes no sense to anyone who understands a little about economics — or even logic & rhetoric.
    You really need to stay away from liberal econ blogs, Emery.

  9. “You really need to stay away from liberal econ blogs”
    MBerg would appear to believe it’s relevant. He ran a post concerning a 69 million dollar short fall in MN’s tax collections a few weeks back. MBerg went so far as to call it a “slump”. When MBerg characterizes a 69 million dollar shortfall as a slump, what would he consider a 281 million dollar shortfall? As long as the sky is falling, let’s see where else all economic hell is breaking lose. If you’ve not studied or read widely on the topic, economics seems to be fad-prone, capricious, and polarized. You have to get past a lot of politics before you realize that Keynes and Friedman actually agreed on quite a lot.
    Slump
    http://www.shotinthedark.info/wp/?p=46344

  10. EmeryTheUSAhater, who cannot tell whether 100,000 is more or less than 5,000 chimes on a comparative numbers thread. The chutzpah! The ignorance! The idiocy!

  11. “He ran a post concerning a 69 million dollar short fall in MN’s tax collections a few weeks back.”

    But this is not that post.
    Economists, not economics, can be “fad-prone, capricious, and polarized”. Liberals tend to be worse than conservatives because they believe economics has a teleological purpose. Keyensian economics is not a blank check for governments at all levels to allocate current and future resources however they like. The keynesian equation for GDP is Y = C + I + G + (X-M), where Y is GDP. C is consumer spending. It has a multiplier because we have a market economy. Every transaction adds value to GDP. I is investment. It has a multiplier because people invest when they get a return on their money. G is government spending. It has no multiplier because government does not spend money to make money. This is literally first year, textbook economics.

  12. In other words: Trickle-down can never fail, it can only be failed. Wisconsin has failed Walker.

  13. “Trickle-down can never fail, it can only be failed.”
    Strawman ahoy!
    I, of course, never made this argument, would never make it, and frankly don’t quite understand it. Perhaps you believe that there is a theory of economics called “trickle down”? If you want a system that will never fail, look no further than the White House. Obama’s doing thing just right, and he actually believes the shitty economy he has presided over is “strengthening the middle class”.
    Stay away from those Lefty econ-blogs, Emery. They are poison. You will know less, rather than more, about economics when you read them.

  14. On the one hand, on the other hand. For every economist, one can hear and equal and opposite economist. Result nothing. So pick your prejudice.

  15. Emery wrote:
    “On the one hand, on the other hand. For every economist, one can hear and equal and opposite economist. Result nothing. So pick your prejudice.”
    And he’s plagiarizing again.

    “On the one hand, on the other hand. For every economist, one can hear and equal and opposite economist. Result nothing. So pick your prejudice.”
    http://www.economist.com/comment/2474250#comment-2474250

  17. How did you get through school with that attitude about copying verbatim w/o attribution?

  19. Turn that frown upside down big guy! Now take your drool rag and get outside and enjoy the day! Pelican Reef is where I’ll be if you’d like to catch up and fish today.

  22. “Some of the monkeys think
    that they have it all worked out.
    Some of the monkeys read Nietzsche
    The monkeys argue about Nietzsche
    without giving any consideration to the fact
    that Nietzsche was just another monkey.”

    Ernest Cline, “Dance, Monkeys, Dance.”
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NLjJkp9vmE

  23. What would be interesting, Emery, would be to look at the MN and the WI housing starts over a long period — say two decades — and see if they differ significantly. If they do, break it down into counties and see if they differ because because of some outliers.
    A person must be very careful when trying to determine economic cause and effect. If housing starts decline at the same rate in both states, and Walker and the R’s have cut taxes while Dayton and the D’s have raised taxes, what does that tell you about tax hikes/tax cuts and housing starts? Nothing, apparently.

  24. I’m trying like hell to divest from Minnesota, but for the second year in a row, I’ve failed to sell my properties.

    What were you saying, Emery? I’m an ignorant dick, and what?

  26. OK, for Emery’s edification:

    MN State tax receipts down 6.6%
    WI State tax receipts down 2%

    Looks like the suckage in MN is far worse than in Wisconsin by the very sources Emery cites. Now, let’s compare housing starts head to head:

    MN: down 15% for single family homes, down 78%.
    Wisconsin: down 3%

    Again, Wisconsin is looking a LOT better than its neighbor to the west.

    http://www.wisbuild.org/site/publisher/files/Housing%20Starts/2014/Jan-Jul%202014%20Housing%20Permits.pdf

    Criminy, Emery, you got yerself a Ph.D. and you can’t figure out how to do a better apples to apples comparison than THAT?

  29. That post is a hoot, Emery. He says he was nudged into creating his bizarro-graph by some kook named “Bruce Bartlett”, who calls himself a “Lifelong conservative who now hates the GOP for pandering to morons, racists, religious kooks and ignoramuses. ”
    In his first three tweets he attacks Bachmann and the Koch brothers. His wikipedia article says:
    “In a 2013 article for The American Conservative, Bartlett explains that after conducting research for the book, he “came to the annoying conclusion that Keynes had been 100 percent right in the 1930s,” that “we needed Keynesian policies again,” and that “no one has been more correct in his analysis and prescriptions for the economy’s problems than Paul Krugman,” a prominent Keynesian economist.[16]”

    Krugman, bartlett, and Chin probably went to graph-making school together.

  30. Wait, what? The market is overpriced, you say? But, but Minnesota has the lowest unemployment in the nation…and, the best “quality of life”….and, shiny new choo-choo trains….and, the best schools. It’s all golden up there.

    I’m trying to sell properties I bought in 2009, Emery. After the crash. Trying to sell them for the same price I paid, minus the improvements I made naturally, just to get my capital out so I can re-invest it somewhere it will bring a return.

    If what you say is true, and obviously it is, then Minnesota is still in the grips of a crisis of confidence not seen since Carter. It also means Dayton & the DFL clown car are lying through their teeth. Right?

    I bought two houses in South Carolina in 2011, Emery. In poor, backward, low tax, deeply conservative South Carolina. I’m living in one and sold the other last year for a juicy profit. I want to buy more, but because of my Minnesota Suck portfolio, I’m about to lose a bundle.

    BMW is ’bout to spend a billion US dollars to expand their multi billion dollar plant down here…they promise 800 new high buck jobs.

    Toray Industries is just finishing up a $1 billion dollar carbon fiber manufacturing plant. Bridgestone is just finishing up $1.2 billion in expansions.

    Cabella’s just planted one of it biggest stores in the country down here, and Bass Pro is building one right now. I’m so busy at work I haven’t been able to put my new fishing boat in the water this year.

    People are making money here, Emery. And they’re investing it…wish I could join in the fun. And to rub salt into my wounds, not only can I not unload my Minnesota Suck portfolio, the property taxes just took a fat jump.

    Why do leftists hate prosperity, Emery? Why?

  31. The linked Chin article cites Bruce Bartlett, who did great work 30 years ago with Reagan and Kemp. And his notion that different economic theories are appropriate for different times makes sense: Supply Side might have been appropriate for Jack Kennedy and Ronald Reagan because tax rates were high enough to stifle personal productivity. Keynes might have been appropriate for The Great Depression because there were shovel-ready jobs and men willing to take them. Those conditions don’t obtain today so those solutions won’t work.

    Dumping $60 Billion Per Month into the economy is causing inflation but the government doing the dumping is hiding the inflation by manipulating the numbers (more dollars chasing the same number of goods = inflation, same as caused the housing bubble).

    Real wages haven’t risen since the 1970’s when the labor pool grew to include more women then exploded with illegal immigrants (increased supply of labor competing for same number of jobs = lower wages).

    Working families literally are poorer now than they were 40 years ago, due to Democrat policies pandering to special interest groups that make women and minorities feel special today but enslave them long-term.

    It’s okay, though, it’s a temporary problem. Massive government programs lumbering under micromanagement in the Capital based on phony numbers, attacking political enemies to hide the truth while wracking up generations of unsustainable debt . . . this model has been tried. The Russians learned. We will, too.
    .

  32. PM: Aside from name calling and attacking the author of the blog post, you offer nothing in support of your position. It’s a foolish consistency which is a common trait of your persona.

    “The practice of verbal judo—in which one attempts to redirect the force and power of one’s opponent’s words against him—requires dexterity with words, and such skill is not necessarily related to the intellectual prowess or force of ideas behind them.”

  33. I read the Bartlett article here: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/revenge-of-the-reality-based-community/
    He sounds mad. Not as in angry (though he’s angry) but mad meaning crazy. Something seems to have happened to him around 2004. He calls Obama a “center-right” politician. He feels personal hatred towards GW Bush. He is spiteful and want to banish certain people from the GOP. Banish them. Bartlett is incoherent. He hates everything Bush ever did. Bartlett thinks the problem with the economy is inadequate demand, but everything he hates about Bush — tax cuts, big deficits, housing boom, even the medicare prescription benefit Bartlett singles out for special hatred — were classic keynesian stimulants.

  35. Joe Doakes: If the Republicans were to ever come up with a policy bible for successfully leading a nation as diverse as America, Jack Kemp would have been the best man to author it. He thought better ideas should win. Contrast this with some other people who made it to the top of his party who arrived with a complete lack of good ideas, and who were not and are not particularly interested in “ideas”.

  37. Tom, I thought you told me you sold your place on Delaware. And that left you with the North-side property.

  38. PM: I would prefer the ideas from individuals such as Paul Ryan and John Kasich.

    (“God ideas” funny)

  39. Some notions deserve scorn. Chinn thinks Cali is raring to go and Kansas is in the dumps because he likes Cali’s big-spending government.
    Compare the unemployment rate of Cali vs Kansas back to 2000. He had to find some weird derivative or job creation to make a growth showing Cali going up faster than Kansas. Chinn is a hack.

  41. I don’t know why I’ve been “chosen” to serve as the monitor to Emery’s citations, but it’s worth noting that here is the overall shift from the housing stats, January-june 2014:

    Wisconsin: up 14%
    Minnesota: up 3%

    And regarding his link to that “growing gap” between the states, the lines are basically parallel. The author has chosen the exact wrong units to make any point, let alone his.

    Again; criminy, Emery, )O*&)(*&) doctorate in engineering and you can’t even read a table or a graph? What gives?

  42. The God typo is not too far off the mark when depicting some of the Clinton or Kerry proposals. Having said that, I’ve always been skeptical of growth through austerity schemes. They are contractionary in nature. Kansas, Wisconsin and Indiana will most likely lean towards structural budget deficits as a result of declining tax revenues. Perhaps the real cutting has yet to begin?

  43. BB: What’s the spread on Wisconsin’s 2013 figures and this years (2014) YTD figures? Positive or negative?

  44. Positive or Negative? EmeryTheUSAHater, you keep asking questions, yet cannot answer a simple one – which is larger, 100,000 or 5,000. Go piss off!

  45. JPA or should I just call you Walter?

    Your mother is calling for you to come up from the basement; dinner is ready.

  46. Oh, c’mon Emery. I’m sure if you try, you’ll find something someone else said to answer JPA and me. The interweb is a target rich environment for dimwitted plagiarizers.

  47. Any person who believes that you can determine whether lower tax, lower regulation state economies do better or worse than high regulation, high tax state economies by looking at the rate of growth of leading economic indicators normalized to January 2011 (why that date? It’s a mystery!) doesn’t deserve to call him or her self an economist.
    When you look at the Philly Fed data Chinn used to draw his squiggles, you find that it makes no such pronouncement. It doesn’t talk about CA, KS, WI and MN. It’s a regional bank, it talks about Jersey and Pennsylvania. The Philly Fed web site has a nice map where it colors each state according its leading economic indicator outlook. MN and WI are given the same color because the numbers are so close it makes no sense to distinguish between them for purposes of forecasting. Chinn got his data from the accompanying spreadsheet data. We don’t know how he came up with his squiggles, he left that part out, but he did mention the name of the Philadelphia Fed.
    Some people should be kept as far from Excel as possible.

  48. the real evaluation of rate of growth should be; who sets the book and what’s the vigorish?

    The government is the house and the house always gets its vig no matter what your bet, win or lose you pay the vig. However unlike honest bookies(oxymoron, yes) the current govt wants you working the slots, faro and roulette wheel where all degenerate gamblers gravitate not at the poker tables where skill and intelligence can make a difference that means you walk out of the casino with more cash than you brought in the door.

    This is why Emery can’t differentiate 100,000 from 5,000 – the flashing lights and ringing bells are all the same to him.

  49. Emery:

    I went to the Wisconsin department of Revenue to look at what happened. If you compare fiscal year 2013 with fiscal year 2014 every item listed with the exception of income taxes is up for fiscal year 2014.

    Now based on the chart that the Wisconsin Department of Revenue put out there was an estimate done in January 2014 (and note that is a January 2014 estimate) where the estimate of what they said will be off is off by that figure of $281,000.

    Besides the facts:

    Over six months if we need to panic it averages to 46.8 million a month less than one month drop for the new budget for Minnesota.

    A bunch of categories such as corporate profits while they were up for 2014 compared with 2013 were down from the estimate.

    And one thing not mentioned by you and I can’t find a set of data for this Scott Walker got passed in March 2014 a $500 million tax cut while Minnesotans were having to cope with a tax increase. If the estimate was put out before Walker’s changes were implemented that could explain the miss in revenues with the estimate.

    Okay if you want to preach about the sky is falling in Wisconsin keep in mind Walker and the Republicans will cut the budget to avoid tax increases. Emery’s, Dayton’s, and the Democrats approach in Minnesota is to raise taxes to increase spending since tax increases don’t affect the economy. While is Il doing so bad that they are about to kick out the Democrat governor while John K is heading to an easy reelection in Ohio?

    Walter Hanson
    Minneapolis, MN

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