Economic theory often informs public policy. So it’s no surprise that, in recent years, as pockets of economists have taken a cue from psychology and started to form models that assume human beings are not always rational, money-driven decision-makers, policymakers would notice. Last year Mike Grunwald wrote a lengthy story on the topic. Yet George [...]
Health care reform passed. Now it looks like financial re-regulation will, too. For a long time, businesses have been complaining that they can’t hire and they can’t invest because of all the uncertainty the Obama Administration has injected into the system. Who can make plans when no one knows what the American health care system [...]
Richard Florida’s recent piece in the FT, “America needs to make its bad jobs better,” presents a pretty interesting argument, one that a nation so focused on job creation might want to keep in mind. Florida points out, as plenty of others have before, that the sorts of service-sector jobs the U.S. is on track [...]
Over the past decade or so, there has been a lot of hand wringing about how minorities in the U.S. use computers and the Internet at lower rates than whites. That ostensibly handicaps them in realms from searching for a job to finding the best deal on a car. A 1999 report from the Commerce [...]
As you may have noticed, most states are finding themselves in fiscal straights. States took in $87 billion less in tax revenue between October 2008 and September 2009 than they did in the prior 12 months, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. That has led to all sorts of service cuts and [...]
I’ve got a story in this week’s magazine about the movement among state and local governments to tax soda. Such taxes are seen as a way to both raise revenue and discourage consumption of a product linked to obesity (and, in turn, rising health costs). As Kansas state senator John Vratil told me, “I thought [...]
David Leonhardt is out with a great column on the spend-vs.-austerity debate (which Steve and Michael have also rung in on). Leonhardt’s piece provides both historical context and intellectual honesty: there are reasons to think it’s time to cut governmental spending and avoid future problems associated with high levels of sovereign debt, but there are [...]
Here’s a question that might be worth asking. With both the House and the Senate zeroing in on passing a bill to overhaul the financial industry, why are we still so deeply enmeshed in debating the causes of the financial crisis in the first place? I ask because as Congress enters what appears to be [...]
We’ve known for a long time that the expiration of the federal home-buying tax credit would trip up the housing market. Many people who had been planning on buying a house down the road accelerated that decision in order to grab the credit. The byproduct of that acceleration was always going to be that post-credit [...]
The smaller-than-expected number of housing starts in May helped send the stock market lower this morning. This chart from Calculated Risk (which you can click on to make larger) puts things in perspective:
