Just a few links folks might find worth perusing. First, a few thoughts about President Trump’s tax “plan:” –I don’t think it makes sense to discuss corporate or business taxation anymore without including pass-through businesses, which comprise most businesses and about half of business income. And Trump’s plan opens up a fat, new loophole in… Read more
Archive for the ‘Economic Growth’ Category
Quick note re GDP Q1 report: Keep your eye on the trend
The economy grew at a slow rate of 0.7 percent in the first quarter of this year, according to this morning’s GDP report. But that low number–headlines stressed that it’s the slowest rate in three years–should be largely discounted. The underlying trend growth rate of the economy remains a moderate, and pretty steady, 2 percent…. Read more
You know the full-employment productivity multiplier I’m always going on about?
Well, economist Josh Bivens wrote a neat paper about this dynamic, and I interviewed him about the results for my WaPo post today. Check them out.
Before you blame the robots, look to the policy (and the data)
This very incisive bit of work from the NYT editorial page makes two critical points: The data do not support the claim that there’s been an acceleration in labor-replacing technology displacing US workers. To the contrary, measures of capital investment and especially and most persuasively, productivity growth, have slowed, trends that point in the opposite… Read more
2016Q4 GDP: a) trend growth at low inflation b) what we should be talking about in this space
Real GDP grew at an annual rate of 1.9 percent in the last three months of 2016. That’s a slowdown from the pumped up 3.5 percent rate of the prior quarter and a bit of a downside miss off of the market expectation for a 2.2 percent growth rate for the quarter. But like it… Read more