Mark Thoma and Andrew Samwick discuss problems with and potential solutions for the social safety net in this week’s WSJ Econoblog. They cover several important points, but following up on some posts from last week, let me highlight their discussion of the pros and cons of a single-payer health insurance system. Mark Thoma argues that […]
Credit goes to James Hamilton for what may be the best takedown of the gold bugs over at the National Review I’ve seen yet: What’s behind the ongoing run-up in gold prices? One popular interpretation is that investors fear a resurgence of U.S. inflation. But that story just doesn’t square with the facts … I […]
CNN reports: The hearing began with a sudden and sharp partisan dispute when Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter ruled that Gonzales did not have to be sworn in to testify. After Democrats strongly objected and demanded a roll-call vote, Republicans prevailed and the attorney general did not testify under oath. Before one asks why […]
Menzie Chinn gets the last word on the most recent news regarding employment growth – except for the fact that I’ll do a small summary of one aspect of his post that took a longer view of the revised payroll survey figure – with my own graph of this revised series from October 2000 to […]
In the spirit of Brad DeLong’s course on economics reporting, I noticed this morning that Joel Havemann of the LA Times does a reasonably good job providing some context against which to measure the Bush administration’s budget rhetoric: Bush Budget Plan Strikes Home, Not Deficit WASHINGTON — President Bush today will propose a $2.7-trillion budget […]
Lawrence Kudlow claimed: Including revisions, January employment is a huge 317,000 above the initial December level. James Hamilton reads this sentence and writes: I’m not quite sure where Larry is getting this 317,000 figure, but I am inclined not to make too much of the data revisions. As the table on the right reveals, the […]
So asks Lawrence Kudlow who writes: Economic pessimists have had a field day ever since GDP was reported a week ago at only 1.1 percent for the fourth quarter. But the latest jobs report released on Friday blew them out of the water. Including revisions, January employment is a huge 317,000 above the initial December […]
Apparently, Donald Marron testified to the Senate Budget Committee yesterday – and if the account I’m being told is true, I have a lot more respect for Senator Judd Gregg (Republican-New Hampshire) than I do for Mr. Marron. From a Tax Analyst account of the testimony: Marron told the committee that the February 1 passage […]
Via Tyler Cowen, John J. Donohue and Justin Wolfers questions the empirical evidence purporting to show that capital punishment deters murder: Does the death penalty save lives? A surge of recent interest in this question has yielded a series of papers purporting to show robust and precise estimates of a substantial deterrent effect of capital […]
This morning the BLS released its estimate of net new job creation in Janaury. Including upward revisions in the new job estimates for the previous few months, it was a pretty good report: Nonfarm payroll employment increased by 193,000 in January, and the unemployment rate fell to 4.7 percent, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of […]