In recent years the BLS has developed a new database where they can track the jobs created by an establishment over time. It is called Business Dynamics and you can read about it here. Research using the new database has altered the basic view of where jobs are created. The old view that jobs are […]

by run 75441 The Medicare Sky is Falling Part of the Medicare Sky Falling story is a claim that doctors are refusing to accept new Medicare patients because of low payments. It is common for politicians and pundits to pontificate declaring Medicare is broken. A doctor himself, Wyoming Senator Barrasso made the claim to CNN’s […]

Fitch won’t downgrade the U.S., but they have downgraded Chirstiedom, officially because he didn’t pillage the state’s severely-underfunded Pension Funds enough. Of course, those Pension Funds wouldn’t be so underfunded if they had been funded instead of f*ck*d by the Whitman Administration’s Coke-Induced Budgeting Practices. (The “miracle of compound interest” includes that it doesn’t compound […]

by Mike Kimel Most economists believe that unemployment benefits increase the unemployment rate. The idea is that even having a relatively small income coming in (from unemployment) can encourage people to stay jobless just a little while longer. And no doubt there are people who play the unemployment compensation game fairly well. Now, consider severance […]

Scott Lemieux linked to an article that in turn referenced a BEA report on state GDP gains with this map: or, if you just want to see the numbers, “Growth only slightly lower than Michigan’s” should be a great campaign slogan.* *And that’s ignoring that the second-largest contributor to that gain is Finance and Insurance. […]

Governor Perry of Texas is making the claim that the Texas 2003 tort reform lead to Texas having 20,000 more doctors. I challenge him to document his numbers. Here is the number of doctors registered to practice in Texas before and after the 2003 tort reform. The data is from the official state registry that […]

by Daniel Becker (This is a long post. The time for sound bite debate to the demise of learned discussion is over for we are flirting with danger.) Via a post at Financial Armageddon I learnt of a paper looking at the relationship of austerity implementation and social unrest. It is recent, dated August 2011. […]

Tyler Cowen doesn’t much. I tend to agree with Cowen. Nominal rigidities were quite the thing just before I arrived, so I think they are over rated. However, there are two points one of which is totally twitty and the other of which is a dead horse still being beaten by Paul Krugman. OK twitty: […]

by Rebecca Wilder Global slowdown underway – it’s more than the Japanese supply chain disruptions The global economic rebound is slowing markedly. With a tightening bias in emerging markets and a US recovery that continues to disappoint, external demand for any country that ‘needs it’ – those countries mired in fiscal austerity without monetary autonomy, […]

The real story of Michelle Bachmann’s “win” in the Iowa straw poll (not to be confused with the Iowa primary) isn’t that she got just over 4,800 votes—it’s that she paid for 6,000, proving at least 1,200 Iowa straw pollers are smarter than most of the reporters covering her “win.” Late to the party mention: […]