Trans Pacific Partnership is Not Especially Important Paul Krugman argues that the Trans Pacific Partnership is no big deal: I’ve been getting a fair bit of correspondence wondering why I haven’t written about the negotiations for a Trans Pacific Partnership… The answer is that I’ve been having a hard time figuring out why this deal […]
Brendan Nyhan at Columbia Journalism Review reminds us to be careful about debating budget priorities: How should the United States choose among the difficult tradeoffs it faces in setting the federal budget? There’s no one correct answer, but you wouldn’t know it from coverage of the budget deal between Senator Patty Murray and Rep. Paul […]
Via Alternet comes this reminder: News media should illuminate conflicts of interest, not embody them. But the owner of the Washington Post is now doing big business with the Central Intelligence Agency, while readers of the newspaper’s CIA coverage are left in the dark. The Post’s new owner, Jeff Bezos, is the founder and CEO […]
Lifted from an e-mail from reader Jack (http://angrybearblog.strategydemo.com/2013/12/20391.html#comments): (attribution corrected…irony comes to mind) Compare Fujita’s conclusion from the Fed paper, here http://philadelphiafed.org/research-and-data/publications/research-rap/2013/on-the-causes-of-declines-in-the-labor-force-participation-rate.pdf#page=7, with da Costa’s description in the WSJ. da Costa, “Philly Fed economist Shigeru Fujita argues that the shrinking of the U.S. workforce over the past year and half was “entirely due to retirement” […]
Emerging Strategy for the DEMS; Karoli at Crooks and Liars, Dems Strategy on Extending Unemployment Insurance Dems will leverage their votes to pass the Farm Bill for an extension of Unemployment . “Now that Congress is set to leave town even as unemployment benefits for 1.3 million Americans are set to expire just after Christmas, […]
From author Heidi Shierholz at Economic Policy Institute: A blog post by Pedro Nicolaci da Costa in the Wall Street Journal highlights findings from a paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia that much of the shrinking of the U.S. workforce has been due to workers retiring early… … I’ve looked at the breakdown […]
Obama argues that government action is required to redress the growing disparity between rich and poor, diminished opportunities for upward mobility and economic stagnation. Public opinion, at least according to the Stimson analysis, is moving in precisely the opposite direction. A 2011 Pew Research Center survey gives us a glimpse of some of the headwinds […]
It’s critical to understand that Third Way presents itself as “centrist” and a think tank: Third Way Via Huffington Post Bill Black summarizes the profiles of the trustees: Twenty of the twenty-nine trustees come from finance (counting the lawyer whose specialty is representing private equity firms). Their most common background is Mitt Romney’s — private […]
(Reuters) – Employers tried the carrot, then a small stick. Now they are turning to bigger cudgels. For years they encouraged workers to improve their health and productivity with free screenings, discounted gym memberships and gift cards to lose weight. More recently, a small number charged smokers slightly higher premiums to get them to quit. […]
Via Economist’s View, Paul Krugman notes a pattern in out post racial rhetoric: So what’s this all about? One reason…, Daniel Little suggested in a recent essay, is market ideology: If the market is always right, then people who end up poor must deserve to be poor. I’d add that some leading Republicans are, in […]