Since 10/1/93, the federal gasoline tax has been 18.4 cents/gallon (24.4 cents/gallon on diesel). Gross gas tax revenues are about $45 billion/year with 60%, or $27 billion coming from gasoline ($18 billion from diesel). Thus, each penny of the gasoline…
CPI inflation rose a whopping 1% in May and is up 8.6% Y-o-Y, it’s fastest pace since 12/81! Worse, inflation is increasingly broad-based. Y-o-Y, groceries are up 11.9%, their fastest rise since 1979. Services, 45% of GDP, are rising at…
The Friday File: Ever wonder why ice cream stores and supermarkets have so many flavors? It’s because our tastes are wildly diverse. The most popular flavor of ice cream is, unsurprisingly, chocolate, but it has just a 14% market share!…
The recent plunge in Target, Walmart and other “defensive” type stocks that had been largely unscathed from the recent equity carnage occurred for three reasons: the ability of such firms to pass on price increases may have reached their limit,…
While wholesale used-car prices (on a mix- mileage-and seasonally adjusted basis) inched up 0.7% in May compared to April, they are up just 9.7% Y-o-Y. While still large, Y-o-Y prices were up 45% as recently as January and 14% in…
From mid-2019 through early 2021, housing inventory declined increasingly fast. Peak decline occurred in early 2021 when Y-o-Y inventory fell a whopping 55% due to unrelenting Covid-19-induced demand. Since then, the declines have steadily shrunk, to -30% in January 2022,…
The economy created 390,000 jobs in May, the labor force participation rate recovered half of April’s decline, rising from 62.2% to 62.3%, and the female labor force participation rate hit a post-Covid high of 57%! Because the labor force grew…
The Friday File: The nation with the fifth most number of islands is, somewhat amazingly, the US with 18,600. Canada comes in fourth with 52,500 islands. In third, with 179,000 islands is Finland, in second is Norway at 239,000 and…
For the first time since 2014, the number of US births rose! In 2021, there were 3.66 million newborns, up 1% from 2020; the increase spanned all cohorts of women over 24. Births remain at very low levels after peaking…
While higher crude oil prices are partly why gasoline is so expensive, it’s only part of the story. The bigger reason is a lack of global refining capacity. Since Covid-19, about three million bbl/day of refining capacity has been permanently…