We've finally gotten around to actually creating a real index to track the tools we've created here at Political Calculations! That means that you will finally be able to click one link on this blog and be able to find all the tools you're looking for to do the math that matters to you!
We've grouped our tools into several obvious categories below and we've also cross-linked several of our tools and groupings to follow common sense. For example, we have a unique category for our Stock Market-related tools, which is also accessible from our Investing category. Please drop us a line if you find other logical linkages that would make the user's guide more useful!
Have you borrowed money? Do you have more than one loan? Does refinancing your loans make sense? Our refinancing suite of tools can help you answer these questions!
Want to find out what the best, worst and average rates of returns recorded in the stock market have been since 1871? Our analysis and tools for stock market performance were tailor-made for you!
Can you predict who will will the upcoming elections? With Political Calculations' election-related tools, you just might! Plus, you can even get a pretty good sense of whether or not the vote counters are playing favorites....
Our tools can help you find what property will give you a better investment return, figure out where the median U.S. housing price will be in 20 years, and answer if you can make enough money to justify becoming a landlord!
How big does the grand prize need to be to be worth playing the lottery? And if you do win, should you take the money as a lump sum or paid out over time?
Our tools can help you answer if the new hybrids make more financial sense than standard cars, whether it's worth the drive to go farther to buy cheaper gas and other questions of interest to the modern road warrior.
How much will your child's college cost? What will it take to pay off your student loan? How much do teacher's really make? Which major's students are the smartest? We answer all these questions and more!
We started off by simply looking at the history of the U.S. national debt. Then we worked out how to manage it. Not much in the way of tools here, but we did show off our mathematical chops....
How fast is pork barrel spending growing in the U.S.? Does Social Security reform make sense for you? The answers to these questions and more are found through our policy analysis tools!
Everything for which we couldn't find a clearly defined category! See if you can find the hidden gems mixed among the items in our blog's junk drawer....
We'll be placing a prominent link for the User's Guide to Political Calculations at the bottom of each of our posts to provide an easy way to find all our tools. We'll update the guide and our index posts as time goes by so that you'll never be more than a few clicks away from where you can find the tool to solve the problems you're seeking to answer.
Welcome to the blogosphere's toolchest! Here, unlike other blogs dedicated to analyzing current events, we create easy-to-use, simple tools to do the math related to them so you can get in on the action too! If you would like to learn more about these tools, or if you would like to contribute ideas to develop for this blog, please e-mail us at:
Political Calculations' U.S. GDP Temperature Gauge provides a means to quickly evaluate the growth rate of the U.S. economy against the backdrop of how the economy has performed since 1980, with the "temperature" color spectrum ranging from a recessionary "cold" (purple) through an expansionary "hot" (red).
The GDP Temperature Gauge presents both the annualized GDP growth rate as reported by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis reports for a one-quarter period and also as averaged over a two quarter period, which smooths out the volatility seen in the one-quarter data and provides a better indication of the relative strength of the U.S. economy over time.
Recession Probability Track
Political Calculations' Recession Probability Track shows the probability that the U.S. economy will be in recession 12 months from the indicated date (shown in red) while revealing the probability trend over the past four years.
Previously, the probability of recession peaked at 50% on 4 April 2007, which means that March-April 2008 was the most likely period in which the NBER would have found the U.S. to be in recession.
As it happens, they almost did. The NBER instead chose December 2007 as the beginning month of the most recent recession (we had found a 46% probability for a recession beginning in that month!)
On the Moneyed Midways
Political Calculations is also the online home of On the Moneyed Midways (aka OMM), a review of the best posts contributed to the week's best business and money-related blog carnivals. More than that, we also name one post in each edition as being The Best Post of the Week, Anywhere! and at the end of each year, we name The Best Post of the Year, Anywhere! as well as identifying the best blogs we found during the course of the year!
The link below will take you to the running index containing our most recent back issues (you can easily navigate the index to find older editions.)
The tools on this site are built using JavaScript. If you would like to learn more, one of the best
free resources on the web is available at W3Schools.com.
Other Cool Resources
ZunZun - Exceptional regression analysis tool. Wolfram Integrator - Solve integrals. Do calculus! Create a Graph - Easy-to-use basic graph-making tool. Many Eyes - Data visualization extraordinaire!
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