Global Investors Are Telling Donald Trump His Deficits and National…
Washington is unnerved these days about budget deficits and the national debt. Deficit angst comes along periodically, often as a pretext for cutting social spending. This time, however, there’s genuine cause for alarm. Outsized deficits are par for the course when the economy is in recession or reeling from a shock like the pandemic or the financial collapse; most of… Continue reading
Cutting Payroll Taxes to Create Jobs
Looking for ways to jumpstart job creation, the White House and Senate heavyweight Chuck Schumer have both come around to the same idea, cutting the payroll taxes that employers pay on new hires. The economic sense of this idea is straight-forward: If you want to induce businesses to hire people whom, under current economic conditions, they wouldn’t otherwise take on,…Continue reading
The Serious Economic Measures that Congress Won’t Consider
What amounts to a small miracle for Washington just happened: The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) issued a new report on the effectiveness of different policy approaches for boosting growth and jobs, and the findings affirm basic economic logic. They also support the particular policy ideas that we urged on the administration at the White House Jobs Summit and, before that,…Continue reading
America’s Path and the Rise of the Rest
The perennial question of America in decline is back. It’s the subject of new books and the cover story of the Atlantic Monthly, where James Fallows does his usual credible job with it. As usual, the forces animating the current sense of national malaise about the future seem to be everywhere, from the chronic disrepair of our infrastructure and the…Continue reading
The World Is Watching and, Oops, There Go Our Interest…
Here’s a piece of dry financial data that could herald big changes in our politics and economy: Over the last five weeks, yields on 10-year U.S. Treasury bonds have risen nearly two-thirds of a point. The interest rates the U.S. government pays are rising across the board, and quickly, and it’s not because the Federal Reserve is tightening credit —…Continue reading
Two Thoughts for President Obama on his Way to Copenhagen
With the President getting ready for Copenhagen, the EPA did what Congress would not: Put in place a policy to ultimately reduce carbon emissions. The EPA finding that greenhouse gases (GHG) pose a danger and thus trigger a process to reduce the risks through direct regulation has become the president’s only “deliverable†in Copenhagen. More important, the only forces that…Continue reading
One Way to Create 1 to 2 Million Jobs without…
At last week’s Jobs Summit, President Obama said he’ll consider any good idea to create jobs. I heard him say it, and I believe him. His speech yesterday at the Brookings Institution offered some decent, standard approaches, including more infrastructure spending and tax breaks for small businesses. The President would be well-served to cast his policy net a bit wider.…Continue reading
How to Create New Jobs in a Troubled Economy
The inconvenient truth that lies behind this week’s White House jobs summit is that there are no magic bullets for an economy thrown over the cliff by a huge financial crisis. Even with all of our stimulus, bailouts, tax breaks and special Fed lending programs, job losses continue to mount, dampening investment and overall demand. That’s not all: Despite the…Continue reading
Storms on the Economy’s Horizon
The high economic anxieties that most Americans felt six months ago may have faded, but count me among economists who are still very concerned. Sure, the last GDP report came in at 3.5 percent, and the next one should show comparable gains. Virtually all of those gains, however, come from the temporary stimulus and unusual inventory corrections. Once those factors…Continue reading