If you have something to say...
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If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
The Blog
Let's coordinate a mass rehiring of workers on a voluntary basis by asking all large and medium-sized employers to increase their employment by 5 percent.
It's often said that the difference between the powerful and the powerless is that the powerful get to walk away from their mistakes while the powerless suffer the consequences. The first-time homebuyers' tax credit, which was added to President Obama's original 2009 stimulus package, provides an excellent example of the privilege of the powerful. Many of the 11 million underwater homeowners in the country can blame the incentives created by the first-time homebuyers credit for their plight. This was really bad policy, which should have been apparent at the time. Unfortunately, it is only the victims who are suffering, not the promulgators of the policy. Welcome to Washington.
Thanks to $10.5 million from the stimulus, Pecan Street is creating jobs and fighting global warming, Tejas style. The smart grid neighborhood acts as a real-world lab to get customer feedback on new technologies.
I've pretty much stopped exhorting policy makers to engage in deficit-financed fiscal stimulus, not because we no longer need it -- we do -- but because it feels like a waste of time. With the fading of the Recovery Act along with state and local budget cuts, U.S. fiscal policy has turned contractionary. Yes, the economy is getting better, and pretty consistently at that. But it's still a slog, and gas prices are pushing the other way, among other factors. So I'm going to briefly drag the idea of stimulus out of hiding for two reasons. First, there's been a spate of research on the bang from fiscal stimulus in certain situations. And second, because Europe is providing such a sad, natural experiment of this forgotten thesis.
The fastest growing category of employment is in temp work, followed by health care and "leisure" -- which is described as consisting primarily of "food service and drinking places." If it's "morning again in America," at least we know somebody's been hired to pour the coffee.
What exactly does Larry Summers have to do to stop being offered important jobs? Hold up a liquor store? Kill a guy? That is the question many are as...
President Obama's political opponents insist that the stimulus did nothing to help the economy and some even claim that it made things worse. The numbers, and a newly released video, tell a very different story.
We as a nation need to think, act, and live smarter. If we don't, all that we have worked hard for over the past 236 years could be lost forever.
Romney opposes the stimulus, but he needs to state legitimate reasons for doing so, rather than misrepresenting the experience of Springs Fabrication.
Richly detailed, judicious, thorough and timely, Money Well Spent? is a primer on how to evaluate this policy -- and all public policies -- in a highly partisan, polarized, paralyzed political climate.
Mitt Romney's got real economists on his team. If he wants to make the case that things would be better if we followed his plan, which is explicitly anti-stimulus on jobs and would liquidate the housing market, let's see the economic model for how it would work.
I was recently asked how some of the key economic indicators are trending going into 2012 from the perspective of the president's record. When Obama took office in January 2009, employment was absolutely cratering. Now it's growing, and, in the private sector, has been since the spring of 2010. The swing from huge negatives to positives is notable and helpful to the president. So he has some strong trend reversals to point to, though while the trend is his friend, the sheer levels still bedevil. Current profits as a share of GDP signal the return of rising income inequality, a major concern for a lot of people today. But here Obama has a very strong case to make that the Republicans' game plan will only make that problem a lot worse.
How long will we permit the major banks to "game" our economic system? Or, maybe it's time to frankly acknowledge they have become the De facto fourth branch of our government, without any amendment to our Constitution.
Across the U.S., critical military installations are being put at risk by environmental change.
The government can't create jobs. Only the private sector can. So ditch the naïve talk that Uncle Sam can wade into this economic mess and do any...
With the Super Committee meeting, it's time to determine how we should speak about the economy. Some commentators like to analogize government spending to a swimming pool, as if you can only take water from one end and dump it in the other end of the same pool. A dollar that the government spends on stimulus is a dollar someone else won't be spending, so there's no net gain. But this analogy is false. A better way to think of the economy is as a car, with fuel as the demand that propels the car forward. The gas tank is empty, but we've got a tank of gas sitting on the lawn next to the car. If we put the gas in the tank, the car can get started and go somewhere.
