As others have noted, conservatives who'd like bash the president on the economy are having an awfully hard time right now, as the recovery proceeds apace. Too slowly apace, for sure, but no objective observer can miss that the trend is our friend and that even the job market, while...

I've always thought the national minimum wage is a lot more important than most people tend to think. By definition, it sets a floor on the low end of the job market, though to their credit, many states now set their minimums above the federal level of $7.25 (Washington...

Well, how about that? A hefty upside surprise from the jobs report. Employers added 243,000 jobs last month -- 257,000 in the private sector -- with gains across most industries. And the unemployment rate ticked down from 8.5% to 8.3%, the lowest it has been since Feb 2009.

Technical issues...

Mitt Romney is getting knocked about a bit today for saying that he is "not concerned about the very poor." Not quite "let them eat cake" but sounds bad, right?

Actually, what he seems to have meant, if you look at the context, is that he believes the...

The White House has a good set of ideas out this AM to a) help the housing market and b) help small businesses and start ups. The former sounds good to me; the latter, less so.

First, the economics, then the politics (you can decide whether that's spinach first or...

The following puts together a bunch of stuff I've been posting over the past few months... it's time to start thinking about these ideas in terms of new economic models to replace the old, worn out ones...

The trickle-down, deregulatory agenda -- what I have called YOYO, or "you're on...

In numerous posts, I've argued that the evidence doesn't come close to supporting the conservative talking point that what's holding back hiring is Obama-driven regulatory uncertainty.

Well, here's another data nugget: the share of layoffs, job losses, and UI claims that employers report are due to government regulations or interventions....

Saying nothing about the quality of the candidate himself, I'm increasingly struck by the economic issues the Mitt Romney brings to the table. Because of his professional background, in no small part amplified by the caustic primary debates (and OWS, and partisan dysfunction, and more), the national echo chamber is...

OMG... this is beyond preposterous.

Politifact -- the self-anointed fact checkers -- grade this statement from the president's speech tonight as "half-true":

In the last 22 months, businesses have created more than three million jobs. Last year, they created the most jobs since 2005.

This is not half true or...

Miles Corak has for years been making important contributions to the relationship between inequality and mobility. His data generated the figure in a recent presentation of the issues by White House economist Alan Krueger, featured here.

Corak posts a more recent version of the graph with more countries....

... but not to their own facts.

When Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney asserted that federal low-income programs are administered so inefficiently that "very little of the money that's actually needed by those that really need help, those that can't care for themselves, actually reaches them," my colleagues at the...

Employers added 200,000 jobs on net last month, while the jobless rate ticked down to 8.5%, according to this morning's jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That's a bit better than what was expected, reflecting moderate but broad labor demand across almost all sectors of the...

Based on a spate of recent posts (see here and links therein), a commenter (HT: Greg) asks a good, tough question of yours truly: on the one hand, I've argued long and hard that while we definitely need more progressive tax policies, the fact that the growth of inequality...

Look, I don't want to raise your anxiety level, especially as you're nursing that headache from last night's revelry. But I figure you'd want me to give it to you straight, starting out the new year by cataloging a few of the risk factors in play, economically speaking.

Europe: As...

I was recently asked how some of the key economic indicators are trending right now from the perspective of the president's record. So I crunched some numbers.

Caveats: Election-relevant opinions on the economy are not yet formed, but since I expect 2012 to be a slight improvement over 2011 (with...

Those of us ensconced in debates in support of U.S. manufacturing often hear opponents claiming that the over-regulated U.S. labor market and unionized heavy industry render us uncompetitive in global markets.

That may sound convincing given competition from emerging markets, but there are lots of advanced economies with long records...

I've found much of the Keystone Pipeline analysis to be lacking.

One of the main arguments against it -- the potential damage caused by leaks of the particularly dense goop extracted from the Canadian tar sands -- is of course perfectly sound, especially given the environmental sensitivity of the planned...

I'm increasingly convinced that this point is of central importance: the national debate we're about to have must come down to specifics, to cases, to the actual role of actual programs in our actual lives.

If not -- if the debate stays up at 40,000 feet-we will be...

We may be at an interesting inflection point.

- Large majorities have had it with Congressional dysfunctionality.

- Influential Republicans like Mitch McConnell are recognizing the above and view it as a threat to their party.

- Reasonable conservative voices are writing smart pieces that seem to be reaching for...

Hear those jingle bells in the distance? It's a sleigh coming up the drive, led by that chubby, jolly, old... conservative brother-in-law.

What with Christmas upon us and the family coming around, it's time for the next edition of what to do when that pesky brother-in-law, or aunt, or whomever,...