An interesting question in the air this week is this: to what degree is the US economy shifting resources out of other sectors of the economy and into construction projects? The graph below gives my best answer to this question, which is that the shift into construction is real, and substantial. (Note that the two […]
Kash noted today’s good news on employment growth and provided a graph of the employment-population (EP) ratio, which increased from 62.4% to 62.6%. While this is the first time since October 2002 that this ratio has exceeded 62.5%, the unemployment rate did not fall. The following graph shows why I have argued that the unemployment […]
The BLS’s employment report for April is pretty good: Employment rose in April, and the unemployment rate was unchanged at 5.2 percent, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. Nonfarm payroll employment increased by 274,000 over the month. Job growth was widespread, with gains in construction, mining, and several […]
Leave it to Donald Luskin to extract just one comment from the Washington Post’s Steven Pearlstein interview: Fairfax, VA: Do you agree with Paul Krugman’s assertion that the President’s recent plan to cut social security benefits actually falls mostly on the middle class and not the wealthiest?Steven Pearlstein: No, it was very intellectually dishonest. All […]
William Kucewicz tries to argue over at NRO that “China’s dollar-pegged exchange rate has been one of the bright spots of the international monetary system of the past decade”. His primary argument seems to be that a fixed exchange rate system is both a necessary and sufficient condition for price stability. The evidence he presents […]
Angry only begins to describe how this story makes me: WASHINGTON (AP) – The Labor Department cautioned organized labor in a letter made public Wednesday not to use money from pension funds to lobby against President Bush’s proposal to overhaul Social Security. “The department is very concerned about the potential use of plan assets to […]
Calculated Risk highlights some bits of bad economic news that has come out about the British economy in recent days. Recent declines in retail spending and manufacturing production seem to have sparked a wave of economic gloom in the British media. Today CNN/Money adds fuel to the fire of pessimism about the British economy… and […]
Sita Nataraj and John Shoven write: In order to ease the burden on workers during the retirement of the baby boom generation, the 1983 Social Security Reforms set payroll taxes above the level needed to pay current benefits, thus partially prefunding the baby boomers’ retirement. The military and civil service retirement programs followed suit in […]
Are we Democrats being dishonest about the Bush-Pozen Social Security plan? The latest NRO column from Rich Lowry drew fire from Max Sawicky and Matthew Yglesias. Matthew points out how dishonest Lowry’s op-ed was. But this line is absolutely stupid: Shouldn’t a liberal welcome a proposal demanding sacrifice from the wealthy? Let me get this […]
To no one’s surprise, the Fed elected to raise interest rates by another 0.25% this afternoon. The real information that everyone was waiting for was some indication about whether the Fed seems more worried about the apparent recent slowdown of the US economy, or gradually increasing inflation measures. As it turns out, this afternoon’s statement […]