There is a certain argument used by boosters of last year's stimulus package that urges would-be critics on the left not to miss the forest for the trees. The forest, they argue, looks pretty good: $54 billion in a State Fiscal Stabilization Fund has so far created or...

In 1997, Princeton economist Alan Blinder asked a classic public policy question: "Would the country be better off if more public policy decisions were removed from the political thicket and placed in the hands of unelected technocrats?" Believing the answer to be the affirmative, he revived...

Despite the President's job summit last week and the appearance of momentum for a "jobs bill," the prospects for congressional action in the near future are dim. The House will try to pass a scaled-down bill before retiring for the Christmas holiday, but Majority Leader Steny Hoyer is not

Goldman Sachs's announcement that it will pay 2009 bonuses for its top executives in stock should be met with a collective yawn. But not because these executives were already set to be compensated mostly in stock or even because the outsized profits the firm will make this year...

The financial reform bill that the House will vote on on Friday has become a dark horse for job creation and housing assistance. This isn't the result of the Obama job summit or even of the expanded ranks of regulators who will be hired as a result of the...

Last September, in arguing against passage of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act that created TARP, I hedged:

Government action is absolutely necessary to ensure that middle-class Americans' standard of living does not suffer gravely from the credit crisis.

I cited the many examples where ordinary consumers interact with finance...

A drag. A job destroyer. A wage cutter. A killer. A creature in a late-night horror movie.

Yes, the estate tax, that most reviled of taxes that so many of us cringe at the prospect of paying on our death beds, has once again reared its ugly head. Thankfully, the...

Attempts to paint the economic stimulus package as a failure begin with wordy paeans to budget austerity and end with anecdotes of Spanish wind turbines and prison inmates. Responsible Republicans claim to have proposed a more effective alternative to the stimulus, no matter that an economic adviser...

Friday's New York Times op-ed page contains a necessary, albeit anachronistic, criticism of the tax credit for first-time homebuyers, a "proposal" supported by Senator Chris Dodd. John Carney of ClusterStock and The BusinessInsider argues against extending and expanding the credit. Evidently, he didn't realize that Congress has already...

Conservative blogs have transformed into a hit parade of reasons why the House Affordable Health Care for America Act will kill jobs and the unborn, stifle economic recovery, and destroy ... education. Of course, the need to unsheathe so many harbingers of doom is mostly proof...

For the past month and a half or so, the Senate has been trying to pass an extension of unemployment insurance. The problem is clear: 7,000 unemployed workers are running out of benefits every day, 400,000 exhausted their benefits at the end of September, and 1.3 million will exhaust them...

In an editorial this morning, the New York Times rightly supports a congressional measure, passed by the House Financial Services Committee yesterday, that would hasten the implementation of credit card regulations created by the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility, and Disclosure Act (formerly the Credit Cardholders' Bill...

Consideration of legislation creating the Consumer Financial Protection Agency in the Financial Services Committee this week has reignited debate about the proper role of state authority in regulating financial institutions. The debate features some strange ideological stances, with progressive Democrats arguing in favor of weak federal authority to preempt (read...

Although the stimulus jobs numbers released yesterday by the Obama administration reflect less than 1 percent of the $787 billion stimulus package, our Bubble-Boy mentality leads us to assume that this data means that the stimulus is not working. In any case, the persistently high unemployment rate has also contributed...

In one of those incisive, zeitgeist-capturing essays that makes you nod in agreement, T.A. Franks wrote recently in The Washington Monthly:

The first thing you need to know about New York Times columnist Bob Herbert is that he's always right. No, not in the way a drunk in a...

The financial crisis has left conservative policymakers on their guard. The notion that all financial innovation is good is not holding water and wonks on the right are scrambling to concoct viable alternatives to the Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA) advocated by the White House and, in a weaker...

The recent Supreme Court hearing on the free speech rights of corporations has reignited the debate about corporate personhood. Corporate personhood refers to the handful of rights that corporations share with people, rights like property ownership and contracting. To most, the notion is prima facie a legal fiction: there...

That the unemployment rate “lags” in a recession is well-known.  This means that when economic growth returns, most households – and particularly the unemployed – experience little or no relief in the short term.  Though this is accepted as a rule of thumb, policymakers have done very little beyond ad...

A consensus on the causes of the financial crisis will probably never be reached. However, most observers agree on one thing, at least: that risk and reward, the ying and yang that keep the financial sector in balance, grew wildly out of whack. Perhaps unsurprisingly, congressional efforts to strengthen regulation...

Conservatives like to describe their ideal Supreme Court justice as an uninterested umpire who simply calls the law's balls and strikes, a metaphor Chief Justice Roberts employed during his confirmation hearing. These conservatives also like to describe the free market as the same sort of impartial arbiter, rewarding the productive...