LAST WEEK

News & Commentary Weekly Highlights:

• Wall Street Journal: U.S. Adds 255,000 Jobs in July; Unemployment Rate Steady at 4.9% (Friday)
• Wall Street Journal: Bank of England Cuts Key Interest Rate to New Low (Thursday)
• The Daily Signal: To Promote American Innovation, We’ve Got to Modernize This Office (Monday)
• Hoover Institution: The Poverty Of Progressivism (Monday)
• National Review: These States Added Work Requirements for Food Stamp Recipients: Here’s How It’s Working Out (Monday)

 

Top Economic Indicator Highlights:

Employment Situation (July 2016)

• Unemployment rate: July: 4.9%; June: 4.9%; May: 4.7%.
• Nonfarm payroll job growth: July: 255,000; June (second estimate): 292,000; May (third estimate): 24,000
• Noteworthy: According to the BLS July employment report, the number of persons unemployed for less than 5 weeks decreased by 258,000, while the number of long-term unemployed (without work for 27 weeks or more) remained unchanged at 2.0 million. The latter represents 26.6% of those unemployed, compared to the pre-recession average of 14%.

 

JEC Releases:

• GDP Review: Context for 2nd Quarter 2016 GDP (Monday)
• Coats Statement on July Jobs Report (Friday)

 

 

THIS WEEK

 

Upcoming Economic Reports & Releases:

Major Indicators

• Survey of Consumer Expectations (11:00am, Mon)
• Productivity and Costs (8:30am, Tue)
• Wholesale Trade (10:00am, Tue)
• Job Openings and Turnover Summary (JOLTS) (10:00am, Wed)
• Imports/Exports (8:30am, Thu)
• Advance Retail Sales (8:30am, Fri)
• Producer Price Index (8:30am, Fri)
• Business Inventories (10:00am, Fri)
• Michigan Consumer Sentiment (preliminary) (10:00am, Fri)
• Michigan Inflation Expectations (preliminary) (10:00am, Fri)
• Survey of Professional Forecasters (10:00am, Fri)

 

Chart of the Week

 

 

America has the highest corporate tax rate in the developed world, but some argue our companies pay much more competitive effective tax rates after various tax breaks. This chart shows the effective tax rate on businesses in the world’s wealthiest nations* in 2015. The rate measures the amount of taxes and mandatory contributions paid by businesses after allowing for deductions and exemptions in proportion to business profits. It does not include any related personal income taxes, value-added taxes, sales taxes, or excise taxes.

 

The United States ranks number eight of the world’s wealthiest twenty-nine nations. We tie with Tanzania as the nation with the fifty-fifth highest rank of the 169 nations for which data was available. Notably, Canada’s rate is half ours.

 

Reforming our outdated tax code is necessary for the United States to reignite the engine of economic and job growth.

 

*The “wealthiest nations” are those with a 2015 natural logarithmic real GDP per capita at least one standard deviation above the average natural logarithm of real GDP per capita for the 169 nations with data available for 2015.