Kevin Drum notes that the 4 week average ratio of new unemployment insurance claims to employment is the lowest ever recorded He wonders if it has anything to do with tighter standards for receiving unemployment insurance. I think it is just that the labor market is authentically tight. The Job vacancy rate is roughly tied […]
Way to rally the base Turtle Neck! NY Times: No Social Security Raises Even if Medicare Soars WASHINGTON — The 60 million people on Social Security will not receive any cost-of-living increase in their benefits in 2016, the government said Thursday, but because of a quirk in federal law, nearly one-third of Medicare beneficiaries could […]
Adair Turner was interviewed by INET about his new book which I have to buy and read. The book came out this week. It is called, Between Debt and the Devil. Here is the interview. (link) He lays out an exquisite analysis of economics on many layers. How the crisis was not expected due to […]
This has produced another edition of “Simple Answers to Simple Questions.” Just to expand this a bit, and to deal with the 1987 absurdity, the proximate cause of the 1989 adjustment—an adjustment of less than 10% in the Dow that only took two full calendar months to return to its level at close on 12 […]
E.J. Dionne just posted a column online that will be published in tomorrow’s Washington Post. Here are its last three paragraphs: But the debate’s most substantive contribution was to the larger philosophical argument the country needs to have in 2016. Republicans plainly still believe their central mission is cutting taxes, shredding regulations and shrinking […]
I read Paul Waldman’s posts on the Washington Post Plum Line blog regularly and agree with most of what he says, but his claim today that rural young people who can’t afford college aren’t interested in attending college anyway, and those who do attend are fine with borrowing large amounts of money to do so if […]
[Sanders’s] most newsworthy moment, of course, came when he declined Cooper’s invitation to attack Clinton for using a private email server. “[L]et me say something that may not be great politics,” he said. “But I think the secretary is right, and that is that the American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails.” […]
Until last night, the Democratic presidential primary had largely been viewed through a simple frame: Bernie Sanders represents the full-throatedly populist and progressive wing of the party on economic issues, and Hillary Clinton occupies a more moderate, less populist, less-overtly redistributive zone, while edging in Sanders’ direction in order to obscure economic differences between them […]
We are not Denmark — I love Denmark — we are the United States of America. We would be making a grave mistake to turn our backs on what built the greatest middle class in the history of the world. — Hillary Clinton, last night Okay. When I heard that, I said, “Wow. Did she […]