The November Employment Situation Summary can be found here with the headline news being that payroll employment grew by 215,000, while the unemployment rate remained at 5.0%. Interestingly, the household survey suggests employment fell by 52,000 resulting in a decline in the employment to population ratio from 62.9% to 62.8%, while the reported labor force […]

During Katie Couric’s interview with Mary Matalin, I learned three things. The main focus of Matalin’s comments was an attack on those “partisan Democrats and reporters” who dare criticize President Bush’s Iraq policies. Lesson 1: Matalin has an exclusive right to be a partisan. At one point in her tirade against Democrats such as Senator […]

Steve Teles provides a link to this study on the real price of a higher education in the U.S. The study distinguishes between the type of institution. For a public four-year college: At public 4-year institutions, the median price of attendance increased from $10,230 in 1999–2000 to $11,187 in 2001–02 (figure C). The median value […]

The quarterly estimate of housing prices around the country was released this morning by OFHEO. From their press release: WASHINGTON, D.C. – Average U.S. home prices increased 12.02 percent year over year from the third quarter of 2004 through the third quarter of 2005. This represents a two percentage point decline from the previous four-quarter […]

While the recent news about real GDP growth has been pretty good, Lawrence Kudlow overstates the case again: If former President Clinton had overseen this economy, he’d have held daily Rose Garden news conferences to mark the occasion … Real GDP has grown at 3 percent or better for ten straight quarters, averaging 4.1 percent […]

Kash detailed the latest good news on U.S. real GDP growth. Eurostat provides a link entitled “Euro-zone and EU25 GDP up by 0.6%” (approximately 2.5% per annum) for the third quarter of 2005. It appears that Europe is also recovering from the global recession of a couple of years ago.

Senator Schumer is stunned that Samuel Alito wishes to chip away at a woman’s right to choose: WASHINGTON – As a Reagan administration lawyer in 1985, Samuel Alito made clear his hope that the Supreme Court would one day overturn a landmark ruling that established abortion rights. But Alito, now a Supreme Court nominee, argued […]

Some have argued that at least part of the rise in oil prices over the past two years is due to speculation, rather than fundamental changes in supply and demand. For example, a paper that I just finished reading by Antonio Merino and Alvaro Ortiz (“Explaining the so-called ‘price premium’ in oil markets“) calculated that […]

This morning the BEA released an updated estimate of GDP in the July-September period of 2005. Real gross domestic product — the output of goods and services produced by labor and property located in the United States — increased at an annual rate of 4.3 percent in the third quarter of 2005, according to preliminary […]

Kash has been doing a very good job of keeping us abreast of some real reporting on the sad state of affairs in Iraq. When I saw the title of this article, which was, “Bush, Rumsfeld: Iraq Strategy is Working”, I thought that it would be nothing more than the tired old White House talking […]