I was a guest on the Jay Thomas Show on WDAY radio out of Fargo today. The guest host was Rob Port from the SayAnythingBlog, Forum Communications Op-Ed pages, TV appearances, and probably a bunch of stuff I am forgetting. He might be getting close to the title of “King of All North Dakota Media” at this point. The topic was forecasting. Yes I know. Friday afternoon in the summer and we were talking forecasting. I do not apologize for it, since I am pretty much always thinking about statistical models.

Continue reading Good forecasting is not about getting it right the first time

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I enjoyed my guest hosting duties on the radio today and wanted to follow-up on a question from a caller. The caller wanted to know how many people were currently working and paying into Social Security and if the number were lower than in the past and, as a result, causing some of the financial woes for the program. Actually the number of workers paying in right now is the highest it has been, but what I told the caller to pay attention to was the number or workers per retiree, or beneficiary. The OASDI trustees report (available here) gives all this information, but I boiled it down to a simple graph.

Continue reading OASDI and Workers per Retiree

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Several former students asked questions about forecasting performance and I assume it has to do with my recent post about the performance of the forecast of North Dakota sales tax. As they well know and a quick investigation would make clear, there is no shortage of discussion of these issues. The student know this, it is one of the things I tell them is constantly updated in the field.

Continue reading Want Technical Forecast Info? Read Dave Giles’ Blog

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Sales tax is by far the largest consistent component in revenue generation for the state of North Dakota, but it is by no means the only one. With that in mind I am generating similar information for other revenue streams. Today it will be corporate income taxes. This one is a bit tricky to look at because there are instances of missing values. These are not missing in the sense that somebody is hiding something; these are missing values in the sense that the report provides nothing for the forecast value for corporate income tax in July, August, and September in that particular publication by the state OMB.

Continue reading ND Corporate Income Taxes

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