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
Health Care’s Raw Deal for Middle-Class Families
Health care reform advocates often point out that the costs of reform should be weighed against the costs of doing nothing. Unfortunately, that’s very hard to do, since our health care and tax arrangements mask those costs so well. I suspect that if middle-class Americans had a better grasp of what health care really costs them, and how those costs…Continue reading
A New Economic Strategy for Hard Times and Good Times
You might not know it from what passes for economic commentary on cable TV, but the U.S. economy remains pretty sick. Last week’s report of 3.5 percent GDP growth in the third quarter seemed like cause to celebrate — until you looked more carefully at the data and saw that virtually all of the upside came from temporary government stimulus.…Continue reading
Scoping Out “Plan B” for Climate Change
Beyond the public’s view, major players in the climate change debate are reassessing their options. In fact, as the prospects of Congress approving a cap-and-trade system fade, discussion is shifting to “Plan B.†One reason is that the version of cap-and-trade which just barely passed the House of Representatives a few months ago, the Waxman-Markey bill, made so many concessions…Continue reading
Who Really Will Pay for Goldman Sachs’ $23 Billion in…
It was an auspicious week for the touchy issues surrounding executive pay. One after another, President Obama’s pay czar, Kenneth Feinberg, announced new restrictions for AIG executives; Goldman Sachs was reported to be putting aside $23 billion for this year’s bonus pool, the largest anywhere, ever; and Elinor Ostrom from Indiana University shared the Nobel Prize in economics for her…Continue reading
What Washington Should Understand and Do to Create Jobs
Policymakers and pundits finally are worried about a “jobless recovery†– and our actual prospects are worse than that term suggests. The initial expansion we may already be experiencing will be notable not for a lack of new jobs, as the phrase “jobless recovery†suggests, but for substantial, continued job losses. Total employment will continue to decline for many months…Continue reading
The Latest Attack on the Census is an Attack on…
The latest fight over the Decennial Census is part of a 30 years’ war over efforts to count everyone in America, including immigrants, minorities and poor people. It’s become an ongoing war, because the Census carries such large consequences. The Constitution mandates a census every decade, because the founders saw a regular, state-by-state population count as the best way to…Continue reading
Message to World at the G-20 Summit: Don’t Depend on…
This week’s U.N. General Assembly and the countless, private discussions between presidents, premiers and prime ministers will range from climate change to terrorism, but most of the leaders are more preoccupied with the outlook for their economies. In this sense, the UN meeting is an opening act for the main attraction, the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh at the end of…Continue reading
The Democrats’ Surprising Emergence as a Real Governing Party
The Republican Party is reconstituting itself in ways that are reshaping the Democrats into a genuine governing party. The tip-off is the GOP’s growing inability — and that’s what it is — to engage with the President and congressional majority in any meaningful give-and-take about the deepest recession since the early 1930s or some form of health care reform. So,…Continue reading