Tomorrow, 4 August 2016, I will be guest host on the Jarrod Thomas Show, 1310 KNOX AM Grand Forks. Topics are up in the air. Let me know what you want to talk to me about or what you want to hear me talk about!
Guest hosting on the radio tomorrow
Top 100 Economics Blogs
Recognition is always nice and while I did not start my blog for fame and fortune it remains nice to be recognized. The website Intelligent Economist listed me as one of the top 100 economics blogs of 2016. This is really, really nice. It is not often your name gets in the same list as Nobel Laureates, soon-to-be Nobel Laureates, and many of the top people in your field. So thanks very much for this listing! There are many great blogs out there and the link below will take you to the Intelligent Economist post which has links to all the blogs they listed.
Sales Tax Revenues in North Dakota
I did some looking at sales tax revenues. I went back to July of 2009 and stopped the graph at December 2015. I will have a separate post looking at the circumstances after that date with the revision of the forecast and what happened then. These data come from the state OMB Rev-E-News publication released monthly.
ND Sales Tax Forecast Performance
This is going to get a bit more technical than many of my other posts. However, I am a big believer that there is no reason to shy away from complexity, particularly when avoiding it sacrifices accuracy. So we are going to discuss forecast performance for sales tax in North Dakota. There are many different ways to evaluate forecasts and the one I will use here is called a tracking signal.
Not a victory lap
I’ve been saying this for a while now, but I am happy to see somebody else discussing the issue. This Bloomberg article makes excellent points about the issues for North Dakota and several other states experiencing revenue shortfalls.