The legislative session will discuss many policy changes. Governor Burgum suggested a change in the ND individual income tax. I provide a look at data from about the last 20 years in this post.
North Dakota Income Tax History
Why fear a cashless future when we had a cashless past?
Last week a caller asked me an odd question about government policy forcing us into a cashless economy. Here are my thoughts, without the conspiracy angle.
What does a shutdown look like?
A little discussion of shutdowns with a local example thrown in to show that things do get better.
FocusEconomics Post: Tulipmania and Crises
From time to time the calls on the radio turn to questions about the possibilities of market corrections and the likelihood of recession, panic, depression and so on. For the most part these calls died down since 2014 or so, which may just mean they are getting ready to start up again. The number of pages devoted to the examination of economic crises, financial market and otherwise, is long and there are some good and many bad and I try to steer callers to the better ones as much as I can. To that end, Brian Dowd at FocusEconomics wrote up a really nice history of the Tulip Crisis, one of the first financial panic/crisis events we really understand as a bubble. You can find his full post here.
Continuing Explorations in ND Growth
After the boom comes the bust, or so we are told. One of the more interesting questions for North Dakota is the extent of the pain, if any, felt during the bust, and how it ends up distributed across the state. To help answer this question we need to continue analysis of the circumstances of growth in North Dakota during this century. Call it a Nearby Economic History. A better understanding of the process of economic growth in the state is 1) important in its own right (knowledge for its own sake is seldom bad), and 2) potentially useful information as the state discusses policies going forward.