{"id":2476,"date":"2007-10-05T13:58:44","date_gmt":"2007-10-05T13:58:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mmm.9dotdigital.ca\/?p=2476"},"modified":"2025-03-27T15:48:31","modified_gmt":"2025-03-27T15:48:31","slug":"us-income-growth-supporting-consumption","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mmm.9dotdigital.ca\/?p=2476","title":{"rendered":"US income growth supporting consumption"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Amazingly, the US Treasury publishes <u>daily<\/u> figures on withheld income and employment taxes (similar to UK pay-as-you-earn taxes). In theory, these receipts should be an excellent real-time indicator of employee incomes, which account for about one-half of GDP. Even better, the information is ignored by most economists. <\/p>\n<p>The daily figures are noisy and need to be smoothed and adjusted for seasonal variation. As the chart shows, the resulting series has been a good guide to the broad trend in the economy in recent years, signalling the 2001 recession, the slow recovery of 2002-03 and subsequent acceleration. <\/p>\n<p>Withheld taxes softened during the first half of 2007 but have picked up more recently, with unsmoothed September receipts particularly strong. This was a good tip-off that September employment numbers would be respectable &ndash; non-farm payrolls rose by 110,000 while August&rsquo;s change was revised from down 4,000 to up 89,000. <\/p>\n<p>The full effects of the &ldquo;credit crunch&rdquo; have yet to be felt but favourable income trends should help to cushion economic weakness.<\/p>\n<p><span class=\"full-image-float-none\"><img decoding=\"async\" style=\"width: 500px; height: 300px\" alt=\"USDailyWithheldTaxReceipts.jpg\" src=\"\/storage\/USDailyWithheldTaxReceipts.jpg\" \/><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Amazingly, the US Treasury publishes daily figures on withheld income and employment taxes (similar to UK pay-as-you-earn taxes). In theory, these receipts should be an excellent real-time indicator of employee incomes, which account for about one-half of GDP. Even better, the information is ignored by most economists. The daily figures are noisy and need to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2476","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-money-moves-markets"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmm.9dotdigital.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2476","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmm.9dotdigital.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmm.9dotdigital.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmm.9dotdigital.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmm.9dotdigital.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2476"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mmm.9dotdigital.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2476\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4785,"href":"https:\/\/mmm.9dotdigital.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2476\/revisions\/4785"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmm.9dotdigital.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2476"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmm.9dotdigital.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2476"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmm.9dotdigital.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2476"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}