Economy

Economy and Spending
The date at the beginning of each bullet is the date of the DATA, not the report. If the data date is not available, the report date is used.

CEO Pay vs Worker Pay

 * 1) CEO pay much greater than average worker pay
 * 2) Graph, ratio of CEO pay to average worker pay, 1980 to 2009
 * 3) Graph, growth of CEO pay vs avg worker pay, 1966-2009
 * 4) Table, CEO pay ratio vs average worker pay, US vs other countries
 * 5) Graphics, top CEO pay for US companies. JC Penny CEO gets 1795 times the pay as their average worker!

College in the US

 * 1) 10 college myths debunked
 * 2) Graph, Earnings of college grads vs college costs
 * 3) Graph, College costs and median family income, 1982-2012
 * 4) Different college costs in Minnesota
 * 5) Average net price of college tuition for all US states. Does not appear to count financial aid.
 * 6) Annual college costs for private vs public, 2002-2010. Good illustration show how much costs went up.
 * 7) College cost growth rate 1982-2007. During this time college tuition and fees has gone up 450% while medical expenses have gone up 250%. Backup image.
 * 8) Federal Pell Grants vs total college costs, 1976-2008.

Consumer Price Index

 * 1) Cpi change broken down by CPI category, past 10 years, graph. Each point is a 12 month percent change.

Data

 * 1) Awesome Pubic Datasets site. Multiple links of public data.
 * 2) ASDFree. Multiple data sets from many places including US gov't surveys.
 * 3) BLS.gov. This explains many tables and has links to raw data.
 * 4) Bureau of Economic Analysis. Business income, corporate profits, personal income, GDP, gov't receipts and expenditures.
 * 5) Monetdb + R. Superfast data processing.
 * 6) Opendata.gov. Data at International, US, State and city level.
 * 7) Open data on 500 US companies.
 * 8) 151 Datasets related to US business.
 * 9) Quandl. Economic time-series of datasets.
 * 10) Quora open datasets.

Debt, National

 * 1) List of countries by external debt
 * 2) Per capita debt by country
 * 3) US Debt Clock
 * 4) Public debt map of the world

News


 * 1) 2014-08-01 Not just Argentina, but 11 countries near default on debt. Argentina defaults on debt.

Dollar, US, purchasing power over time is dropping

 * 1) Purchasing power of US Dollar, 1900-2012. Notice steep downslide.
 * 2) Purchasing power of US Dollar, 1774-2008. Includes years the US was on the gold standard, and when the US was not.
 * 3) Cost of living in the US by state. Circle graph. Shows how people are struggling more in certain states. A few major cities in each state are also broken down.

Employment
See also Unemployment.


 * 1) 2014 BLS Labor Force info by race.
 * 2) BLS raw data as text files. Need to find out what series abbreviations mean. Abbrev over view here. These can run to 50-200mb each.
 * 3) 2016-09. "Alternative workers" (like contractors) increased from 10.7% to 15.8% between 2005 and 2015, most of which was Obama's term. “We find that 94% of net job growth in the past decade was in the alternative work category,” said Krueger. “And over 60% was due to the [the rise] of independent contractors, freelancers and contract company workers.” In other words, nearly all of the 10 million jobs created between 2005 and 2015 were not traditional nine-to-five employment. PDF here.

Contractors

 * 1) Source. Contractor jobs grew from 8.8 in 2002 to 14.4 percent in 2014.

Pay for women vs men

 * Sometimes women get paid more than men, like in Sewing.

Federal Reserve- FRED2

 * 1) Lots of graphs from the FedRes.

Gallop Economic Confidence

 * 1) Gallop Economic Confidence and Economic Outlook. You will need access through your university. Weekly graph here. Economic confidence index daily graph with time sliders.

General

 * 1) Americans lack financial literacy
 * 2) WeTheEconomy teaches people basic info on the US economy using short, free movies.
 * 3) FRED2. Federal Reserve data and graphs for free. With time sliders like Google Finance.
 * 4) OECD figures for multiple countries. Includes taking into account income, taxes, gov't benefits, and social programs.

Healthcare

 * 1) Graphic, Cost of healthcare vs life expectancy for many countries. New Zealand has pretty good health care vs life expectancy, and tax rates are similar to the US. Oh wait, a 15% GST.
 * 2) Graph, US CPI vs US medical care costs, 1948-2012.
 * 3) Graph, cost of 1 day in hospital by country
 * 4) Healthcare costs as percent of GDP by country. 2006 data.
 * 5) Graph, US National debt vs GDP. 1791 to 2011.
 * 6) Employer Health Benefits Survey from 2014. Great graphs on how much employer and worker contribute to plans. "In 2014, the average annual premiums for employer-sponsored health insurance are $6,025 for single coverage and $16,834 for family coverage.  The average family premium rose 3% over the 2013 average premium."
 * 7) Medical Debt among the US insured.
 * 8) 45 million Americans without healthcare. 2013.

Obamacare failing

 * 1) 2015-11-28 Obamacare failing.
 * 2) 2015-12-01 United Health CEO regrets getting into Obamacare. "The CEO of United HealthCare on Tuesday said he regretted the decision to enter the ObamaCare marketplace last year, which the company says has resulted in millions of dollars in losses. “It was for us a bad decision,” UnitedHealth CEO Stephen Hemsley said at an investor’s meeting. “In retrospect, we should have stayed out longer,” he said. “We did not believe it would form this slowly, be this porous, or become this severe,” he said."

Home Sales

 * 1) Existing home sales (units) since 2000.
 * 2) Monthly median home sales price since 2000.
 * 3) Monthly housing inventory since 2000.
 * 4) Existing home sales, months of supply since 2000.

Income and taxes

 * 1) Personal exemption as percent of income compares 1913, 1975, and 2014.
 * 2) Real wages haven't changed in decades. Pew Research. Oct 2014.
 * 3) Real median US income, accounts for inflation.
 * 4) Tax rates by country.

Minimum Wage

 * 1) Total US workers: 143,212,000. At least age 16 and paid min wage or less: 3,550,000. Percent of US workforce paid min wage or less: 2.5%.
 * 2) Minimum wage workers from BLS.gov
 * 3) History Of US Min wage.png The Mininum Wage was highest in the late 1960s in 2013 dollars.
 * 4) Pro: 60% of small business supports GRADUAL minimum wage increase to $12/hr. US national poll.
 * 5) Pro and Con: Effects of raising the min wage. This page alone has lots of links to many studies. Worth reading.
 * 6) Pro: Raise the Min Wage.
 * 7) Pro: Myths about raising the min wage.
 * 8) Con: The California Restaurant Association, a powerful trade group, came out against any sort of raise, arguing—as it has elsewhere—that minimum-wage increases lead to job losses and price hikes.
 * 9) 2016-0105. Fake Min wage study makes erroneous predictions, and provides no historical data.
 * 10) 2016-0509. Fast food owners plan on firing workers if min wage goes up.
 * 11) 2017-07. Min wage hike in Seattle, WA reduced worker hours. "Consequently, total payroll fell for such jobs, implying that the minimum wage ordinance lowered low-wage employees’ earnings by an average of $125 per month in 2016." (Reduced $1500 per year.)

Population, General, US

 * 1) Wikipedia on racial profile of the US. White: 77.1%, Black: 13.2%, Hispanic and Latino: 17.1%.
 * 2) US Census Bureau, 2014. Population percent by race.

Poverty

 * 1) Poverty rate by gender and US state. Overall US: 11% men, 15% women in poverty.
 * 1) Poverty info from Census.gov.
 * 2) Percent in poverty by race, 2014. White: 12.7%, White, not Hispanic: 10.1% (White not Hispanic defined), Black: 26.2%.  24.2% are not US citizens.
 * 3) Income deficit for people below the poverty threshold. Also income surplus for people over the poverty threshold. For below poverty threshold, the biggest group of 26.8%, had an income deficit of $15,000+.

Printing Industry

 * 1) BLS printing industry data.

Small business

 * 1) 99.7% of US businesses are small businesses with less than 500 employees.
 * 2) Small business info from IDC. They define Small and Mid-Sized Busines (SMB) as 100-1000 employees. "Employ half of all private-sector workers and 39% of workers in high-tech jobs. Provide 60% to 80% of the net new jobs annually. Pay 44.3% of total U.S. private payroll. Produce more than 50% of nonfarm private gross domestic product, or a GDP of roughly $6 trillion.  52.6% of all retail sales. 46.8% of all wholesale sales. 24.8% of all manufacturing sales."
 * 3) Small business revenues, average. "Eighty percent of the 28.1 million small businesses in the United States do not have employees. On top of that, more than half of all small businesses are home-based businesses, with construction companies leading the way. The average receipts (or revenues, not profit) of small businesses with no employees is $44,000 per year. Two-thirds of these businesses earn less than $25,000 per year." Breakdown by number of employees.
 * 4) Revenue (sales) per employee. The Container Store Pays great employees $18 an hour, and has lower employee cost. But that also means people will be fired more often if they aren't great. Mediocrity is not allowed here. Even in 1913 Henry Ford did the same, he doubled the pay for employees from $2.50 to $5 an hour. The success of his Model T automobile generated lots of profit.
 * 5) CENSUS.GOV small business link.
 * 6) Industries at a glance. From BLS.
 * 7) Profit margins for many US sectors. Jan 2017.
 * 8) Corporate profits after taxes since 1948.
 * 9) Entrepeneurs declining for many years. WaPo.
 * 10) OnSmallBiz Twitter account. Might have studies or graphs.
 * 11) Minority Women the fastest growing group of small business owners.

Unemployment

 * 1) **Labor force participation rate from BLS.
 * 2) How is the unemployment rate defined? The U3 is the most commonly reported unemployment rate, but only includes the total unemployed vs the civilian workforce, it does not include the gov't workforce. The U6 shows a better picture: "total unemployed, plus all marginally attached workers, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all marginally attached workers."
 * 3) Lots of data from US BLS in tables and text files, including unemployment, inflation, employment, pay and benefits, productivity, spending and time use, workplace injuries, employment projections
 * 4) Unemployment in Europe
 * 5) Graph of US unemployment since 1950
 * 6) BLS employment report.
 * 7) 33% of people out of workforce, highest since 1978. But a lot of these are retired baby-boomers, which is a large generation.

Welfare

 * 1) Welfare by sex, single adult. Men: 3.8 million, Women: 8.7 million. This is people on welfare, not percent of the head of household.
 * 2) Welfare rate by race, sex, and age. 1980-2009. Men: 6.1%, women: 6.9%.
 * 3) 1992. Most people on welfare are white. 1992. While hardly timely, this is still an interesting glimpse into the past.
 * 4) 2012. In 2012 41.6%, blacks were more likely to be on a welfare program. This 2015 PDF report only has data through 2012.
 * 5) 2016. 35% of Americans get some type of welfare. Sep 2016. 39.6% are black, 16.8% are white, 21.2% are hispanic. 39 (78%) of US states pay welfare benefits that are more than the minimum wage.
 * 6) 2016. Millions of people on welfare, graph since 1960.
 * 7) Time spent in various US gov't programs.
 * 8) More welfare stats from Statistics Brain.
 * 9) 39.6% of welfare recipients are black. 16.8% are white.

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