The Sunshine State The Sunshine State is looking sunny for one presidential candidate, and it’s not Bush. This despite Florida’s modest (2.8% in 3 years) job growth: If, as I’ve argued before, job losses hurt Bush (e.g., in Ohio and Pennsylvania) then why won’t job increases help him in Florida? In a nutshell, Florida’s working-age […]

Further Declines in Consumer Confidence From CNN/Money: NEW YORK (CNN/Money) – Consumer confidence slid further in early March, according to the results of a relatively new private survey released Tuesday. The monthly consumer confidence measure compiled by Investor’s Business Daily and TechnoMetrica Market Intelligence, a private research firm, slid to 54.5 in March from 56.5 […]

Fixing His Own Mistakes? Last Thursday President Bush talked about the economy while visiting Bakersfield, CA. As usual these days, he used the chance to lobby for making the 2001 tax cuts permanent: [W]e need to make sure the tax cuts are permanent. See, the tax cuts are set to expire. That’s what a lot […]

Consumer Debt I just took a look at last week’s release of the Fed’s Flow of Funds Report for 2003. It shows debt levels, especially among consumers, that have increased very rapidly in recent years. Much of this is due to the famous increase in mortgage debt that consumers took on last year, but other […]

Blix Book Former UN Chief Weapons Inspector Hans Blix has a book coming out, Disarming Iraq: the search for weapons of mass destruction. Based on this Blix interview in the Independent, Blix isn’t pulling any punches: “… My gut feelings [at the start of renewed inspections], which I kept to myself, suggested to me that […]

That Liberal Media In the NYT today: Because that group is patriotic and somewhat fiscally conservative, some experts said Mr. Kerry, a New Englander, would not appeal to them. The piece is otherwise an informative and interesting analysis of Florida. But seriously, what was the reporter, Abby Goodnough, thinking when she wrote that sentence? Goodnough […]

Winning the Senate? Josh Marshall links to a CBS News story indicating that Democrats have a shot of taking back the Senate this fall. The CBS story cites Alaska, Colorado, and Pennsylvania as states where Republicans could lose a seat. The American Enterprise Institute’s Norm Orstein is even quoted as saying “Look at the run […]

Relax Like many of my readers, I was a bit concerned when a poll (pdf) came out showing that Nader has 6% support in a three-way Bush/Kerry/Nader race. But I pretty quickly decided that that was either an anomaly or that it would fade over time. I didn’t post on the subject because I didn’t […]

Job Creation and Destruction in Service Industries Given the continued lousy state of the labor market, I wanted to know which industries are growing (in terms of numbers of workers) and which are shrinking. Here are the results for the past year, using the newest BLS figures (employment figures are in thousands of workers): My […]

Speaking of Funny Things What’s funnier? A cat wearing a lime helmet or this claim: ‘Bush Boom Better than Clinton Economy‘? I see via Mike Jones’ 18 Minute Gap that the charlatans good folks over at Blogs for Bush have a post with that exact title. No really, they do. Just click here and see […]