My expectations are never sufficiently low: Lobbying Prohibitions Eased For Former Top Officials The timing was perfect: On Nov. 23 — exactly three weeks after the election and as a flurry of top Bush administration officials announced their departures — the Office of Government Ethics declared that it was relaxing prohibitions on lobbying by former […]

Kash comes through again with the monthly BLS report on employment. As I was reading it, CNN was interviewing Mr. Friedman. Noticing the big pop in the Household Survey number, I was expecting him to pull the usual Snow job where the allegedly more reliable series (Household v. Payroll) was the one that showed the […]

A very interesting paper: Gianmarco Ottaviano and Giovanni Peri, “The Economic Value of Cultural Diversity: Evidence from US Cities.” What are the economic consequences to U.S. natives of the growing diversity of American cities? Is their productivity or utility affected by cultural diversity as measured by diversity of countries of birth of U.S. residents? We […]

The November employment figures were released by the BLS this morning. It shows surprisingly weak growth in the labor market: Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 112,000 in November to 132.1 million, seasonally adjusted. This followed a much larger increase of 303,000 in October. In November, employment rose in health care and social assistance, leisure […]

Reader Steve writes in with a good question about Greenspan’s 3-Card Monte: Love your site and have been following the various articles about Social Security. Admittedly, my understanding of the system is very raw as is probably the case with most people who are not economists. My question is therefore very basic. How does the […]

Many of us (see for example Brad DeLong) have been wondering for some time why the bond market does not seem to be reflecting expectations of a dollar depreciation into its prices. Shouldn’t investors be demanding higher interest rates to compensate them for the exchange rate risk that they’re taking on by holding dollars? Yet […]

By way of expanding on some of the recent posts here, and also at CalPundit, (and also because I’ve been too busy to post regularly of late), here’s a re-post of something I wrote on March 2, 2004: ************* Following up on Kash’s earlier post about Greenspan, Krugman’s op/ed also highlights a fairly bold bait […]

The Bull Moose says it is sponsored by the Democratic Leadership Council and judging from this piece on the politics of the Social Security debate, I hope Congressional Democrats pay attention to their blog. As far as the economics, the Moose points to this wisdom from E. J. Dionne: …if Social Security privatization is supposed […]

Kevin Drum has two posts of interest. The first is a longer version of an excellent comment made by Bakho to my last post on this issue as it notes the payroll tax increase of 1983, which was supposed to be for prefunding our Social Security retirement fund but now looks like it was nothing […]

New personal income and spending figures for October were released this morning. The BEA reports a headline figure of a 0.6% increase in income and a 0.7% increase in spending, both of which are quite high. Unfortunately, there are a couple of problems with the report, too. Much of the increase in income and spending […]