Slides from Tonight’s Presentation
Spoke to the very cool and progressive NYC chapter of NASW tonight in the big city. In fact, here’s me and the renowned musician Victor Lesser at Vinnie’s Clam Bar in Little Italy…if you can take the heat, the shrimp with spicy tomato sauce is as good as it gets. Oh, and here are the [...]
The Political Imbalance Facing Unions in America
Harold Meyerson’s piece on the future of labor unions is a worthy read on an important topic (which, ftr, is pretty much always the case with Harold’s commentaries). Harold’s thesis, one that the economist Richard Freeman (dean emeritus of labor economists and one of my heroes) hypothesized about years ago in his book “America Works,” [...]
The Health Care “Market” is So Not a Market
This recent spate of articles about hospitals releasing what they charge for procedures is interesting, predictable, useful, and a timely reminder that our health care system lacks fundamental characteristics of markets, like symmetrical information and consistent pricing. For example, there’s a huge difference between sticker prices and what insurers, especially Medicare, actually pay. Data being [...]
Don’t Leave Home!
Jeez, you go away for the day to warn North Carolinians about snake oil supply-side tax changes that will gut their revenues while shifting the tax burden onto lower-income households, and some candidate for governor proposes to do the same damn thing in your own state! Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II said Tuesday that if elected [...]
Down the Up Staircase
Spent the day in lovely North Carolina where the legislature is contemplating some very bad tax policy. There’s this scourge across the land where a number of states are cutting their income taxes and raising their sales taxes. Bad idea. [Here’s my slides and talk from today: Slides & Talk] First off, you’re shifting your [...]
Hey, What’d I Miss? OTE Summary, 4/30 – 5/6
Looking at pushback against the President’s proposed cap on tax-deferred retirement savings: at what point does a tax incentive become a tax shelter? Considering tax reform: as usual, we’re going about it all wrong. Talkin’ full employment in an op-ed over at the New York Times, and talkin’ taxes at the Milken Global Conference. Jobs [...]
Sequester Watch
Our ongoing feature tracking the consequences of how this really bad idea of across-the-board budget cuts—except when they inconvenience frequent fliers—continues to play out in real time. Meals On Wheels Sequestration Cuts Taking Effect April 29, 2013 By Arthur Delaney Huffington Post http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/29/meals-on-wheels-sequestration_n_3165256.html Smithsonian to close some exhibit areas because of sequestration April 29, 2013 [...]
Don’t Tax You, Don’t Tax Me…Tax that Guy Behind the Tree!
Everyone says they want to broaden the tax base and lower the rates. Until you get specific…then it’s “that’s no loophole, that’s my vitally important jobs, investment, savings, and growth, program!” That’s certainly the way to understand the pushback to the President’s very good and very modest idea to limit the amount of tax deferred savings [...]
Tax Reform: As Usual, We’re Going About it All Wrong
I really don’t like to be cynical—therein lies the way to dark and gnarled soul—so I apologize in advance for this cynical statement (but keep reading…hope is on the way): whatever DC is debating right now, you can rest assured that it’s mostly BS, and I don’t mean Bowles-Simpson. To state the glaringly obvious, lobbyists [...]
Talkin’ Full Employment
…over at the NYT. One of OTE’s favorite topics! Getting good feedback on this piece–there are a growing number of folks who recognize that the market can’t always be counted on to provide an adequate quantity of employment opportunities.
Talkin’ Taxes at Milken Global Conference
Here’s the video from our tax session at the Milken Conference–covered a lot of ground…see what you think.
More on the Cost of Moderate Payroll Growth
In my last post I told you how a) payroll growth is just moderate, not fast, and b) that means the unemployment rate comes down a lot slower than many of us would like. I noted that if we look at the relationship between the annual change in payrolls and that of unemployment, and plug [...]
Jobs Report, Good News, Less Good News, and a Warning
Now that I’ve had a chance to calm down—these early morning releases get me all atwitter—here are three observations from this morning’s jobs report: Good news: First, April’s payroll number along with the upward revisions of the prior two months should dispel, at least for now, the idea that there’s some kind of spring swoon [...]
April Jobs Report Comes in Better Than Expected
Payrolls increased by 165,000 last month and the unemployment rate ticked down to 7.5%, in a jobs report that painted a considerably brighter picture than last month’s version. In fact, the disappointing 88,000 payroll gain for March was revised up in today’s report to 138,000, and in February, new revisions show a large increase of [...]
Jobs Day Tomorrow
I’m expecting 130K on total payrolls and 135K on private, so I’m below consensus, which Bloomberg puts at 153K for the total. I expect the unemployment rate to maybe tick up a tenth. And that’s all the time we should spend forecasting these volatile monthly numbers. More interesting, I think, is the question of why [...]
The Trouble with Low Inflation
The Fed announced today that they’ll continue to be the only ones in town trying to do something about the stubbornly high unemployment rate: The Federal Reserve said Wednesday that its stimulus campaign would press forward at the same pace it has maintained since December, putting to rest for now any suggestion that it was [...]
Pope Francis on Unemployment, Austerity, and Social Justice
Well, how about that? Here’s another highly influential voice getting on the right side of the austerity debate: Pope Francis on Wednesday urged political leaders to make every effort to create jobs and said unemployment was caused by economic thinking “outside the bounds of social justice.” “I call on politicians to make every effort to relaunch [...]
The Costs and Benefits of QE
I’m here at the Milken Institute’s Global Conference, where tomorrow (Tues) I’ll be joining a panel on tax reform (I’ll be sure to post it—they do an excellent job of recording the sessions). I stopped by a session today on the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing (QE: large-scale asset purchases—LSAPs—by the Fed in order to bring down [...]
Hey, What’d I Miss? OTE Summary, 4/23 – 4/29
Looking at what’s happening in the debt debate: I know it’s more complicated than a grad student found some mistakes in a spreadsheet and the spell that had bewitched the nation was broken — but that’s kinda what seems to be happening. Highlighting a worthwhile essay on education, wealth, and inequality. Considering the FAA sequester [...]
Sequester Watch, #2
Week #2 wherein we collect reports of the sequester in action. Just because Congress decided to cancel the highly visible impact of the FAA furloughs does not–repeat…does not–mean this foolishness is over. It just means you have to look a little harder to see it. Section 8 vouchers pulled back April 18, 2013 By Mike [...]
What Debt Crisis, Indeed? Things that Make You Go Hmmmmm…
OK, I know that what’s happening in the debt debate is more complicated than a grad student found some mistakes in a spreadsheet and the spell that had bewitched the nation was broken. But that’s kinda what seems to be happening. This Politico piece tells of some Democrats coming around to the view that “[t]here’s no [...]
Education and Wealth
You want my advice, you should pour a tall cup-a-Joe and settle in to read this essay by Sean Reardon in this AMs NYT on education and wealth. He covers a lot of ground, but the theme that resonated most with me is one I’ve stressed often in these parts regarding the growing evidence of [...]
This FAA Sequester Vote Doesn’t Smell Right
Well, well. It appears that both the Senate and House have voted to end sequester-imposed furloughs of air traffic controllers, just in time for the weekend. You choose: is this bipartisan support to mitigate one of the noxious effects of sequestration, which I and others have been tracking? Or is it papering over the high-visibility [...]
Jared Bernstein’s areas of expertise include federal and state economic and fiscal policies, income inequality and mobility, trends in employment and earnings, international comparisons, and the analysis of financial and housing markets.
