The headline from this morning’s Labor Department jobs report isn’t cheery: the number of people on payroll fell by 131,000 in July. That’s not the direction we need to be going. The payroll number for June was also revised downward, from 125,000 jobs lost to 221,000. It’s important, though, to look at the difference between what’s going [...]
Today’s Senate hearing about for-profit colleges provides something to think about for anyone who feels privatization is the Great Solution to what ails the U.S. education system. We’ve already heard the stories about how much more often students at profit-seeking schools default on their loans. Now we have an inside look at the hard sell [...]
There are two obvious ways to reduce the federal deficit (spend less or tax more), and then there’s the really compelling one—stop using the tax code to guide the way people make decisions. Bloomberg recently reported that the President’s debt commission is focusing “a lot” on tax expenditures—the deductions, exemptions and other tax breaks that [...]
The time is drawing near: Washington is gearing up to figure out how to deal with wards-of-the-state Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. I’ve been reporting a homeownership piece for the magazine, so I’ve been thinking a lot about the U.S. system of mortgage finance, and I’ve come to a firm conclusion about what should be [...]
Another post from Ruchika Tulshyan: Recession got you down? There’s a new way to reach a 1.3 billion-strong market. Rebrand your run-of-the-mill American product, launch a “luxury” ad campaign and sell it in China for 20 times what you sell it for in the U.S. Don’t trust me? Pabst Blue Ribbon did it. The PBR [...]
Ruchika Tulshyan, who is interning at Time this summer, said some interesting things in this morning’s meeting. We asked her to write a blog post. Here it is. As the austerity debate rages on and squabbles erupt over every single point—should interest rates be raised? is stimulus spending good or bad?—there are lessons to be [...]
We all knew housing would sputter after the expiration of the federal home buyers’ tax credit. Of course, we also all hoped that the economy would be on steadier footing by then, and would itself provide some stability to the housing market. Well, unemployment is coming down—it’s now at 9.5%, compared to 10% in December—but [...]
Yesterday the NYT had an assiduously reported piece about job retraining programs which left a pretty bleak impression about how useful they are: Hundreds of thousands of Americans have enrolled in federally financed training programs in recent years, only to remain out of work. That has intensified skepticism about training as a cure for unemployment. [...]
A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about soda taxes, the subject of a story I had in the magazine. At the time, Time.com readers couldn’t see the story, thanks to our new (pay) wall. Well, as it turns out, we’re only hiding our magazine stories for two weeks, and then they’re going up on [...]
Financial re-regulation: check! Here’s a great graphic summarizing what wound up in the final bill. For each category of re-regulation, Jon Hilsenrath explains what problems existed, the solutions Congress came up with and the chances that those solutions will work. It’s a great compilation, one worth checking out. As I’ve been digging into the details [...]
