Here are the companion figures to my WaPo piece today on econ lessons of the decade. 1) The unemployment rate can fall a lot lower than most economists thought without triggering inflationary pressures. 2) Budget deficits cannot be assumed to place upward pressure on interest rates. 3) Weak worker bargaining power has long been a… Read more

For a certain breed of wonk and nerd, it’s not the holiday season until some of CBPP’s best graphs of the year are collected and briefly annotated. This year, Kathleen Bryant and I took a stab at picking some of the figures we thought were most important to document the economic and policy landscape facing… Read more

Payrolls rose by 266,000 last month and the unemployment rate ticked down slightly to 3.5%. Hourly wage growth for all private sector workers remained where it has been, up 3.1%, year-over-year, while the pay of lower-wage workers–the 82% of payroll employment that’s blue collar in factories and non-managers in services–has been trending up a bit,… Read more

Along with many others, I’ve had lots of things to say about Sen. Warren’s Medicare for All (M4A) plan, some positive, some negative, some head-scratchy. But because the issue is so politically loaded, both in terms of the Democratic primary and conservative antipathy toward this or any other idea that expands government’s role in health… Read more

Payrolls rose 128,000 last month, well above expectations for 85K, and job gains in the prior two months were revised up by 95,000 (a sizable upward revision). Also, the October gain of 128K was dampened by the absence of about 50,000 striking workers at General Motors who are now back at work as the strike… Read more