In his fiscal 2013 budget proposal, President Obama has suggested a temporary 10% tax credit designed to spur job creation and wage growth among small businesses. It's a fine idea with a long pedigree -- just the ticket if you're in the market for small-bore economic policies that sound cool but don't do much.
The Obama administration just rolled out something it’s calling a “Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights.” It’s a first draft at this point — think of it as a blueprint for legislation down the road, a statement of principles companies can voluntarily sign onto — but given what it’s meant to do, and how it could [...]
One of the many cans being kicked down Washington’s boulevards these days is the government conservatorship of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In 2008, at the height of the financial crisis, Congress and the Bush administration created the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) and subsequently put Fannie and Freddie into conservatorship under its authority.
President Obama held a rally yesterday in Falls Church, Virginia, where he provided more details concerning his plan, mentioned briefly in his state of the union speech, to stabilize the housing market. The centerpiece of the plan is a new program that would expand HARP to many homeowners whose loans are not backed by government-owned [...]
Here in snowy Davos, the topic of job creation has been about as popular as the passed canapés and free champagne. Not surprisingly, President Obama’s latest jobs proposals — a combination of taxing outsourcing corporations and reviving U.S. manufacturing — haven’t been as popular. It’s not hard to see why.
Perhaps the single biggest headwind the American economy faces, rivaled only by unemployment, is the dismal housing market. American’s biggest source of wealth has been decimated over the past six years, so it was no surprise that President Obama, in his state of the union speech, promised responsible homeowners the chance to refinance and “save [...]
President Obama’s decision last week to kill the Keystone XL Pipeline that would carry oil from Canada to the U.S. was cheered by some environmental activists, while many mainstream commentators reacted with dismay. A Washington Post columnist described it as “an act of national insanity.” But whichever side is right, one beneficiary is clear: Railroads.
Virtually everyone in this country agrees that an uptick in new business creation is essential to solving our deep economic and employment problems. Unfortunately, there’s a huge obstacle standing in the way: U.S. graduates owe nearly $1 trillion in student loan debt, a burden that’s preventing thousands of Millennials from taking an active role in [...]
There’s been a lot of rhetoric since Obama announced on Monday a plan to cut the debt by $3.1 trillion over the next decade, a good portion of which would come from raising taxes on the wealthly. The President’s speech itself contained a good bit of hyperbole. The President said that America’s millionaires pay a lower [...]
Crossposted from TIME’s Ecocentric blog: Last March, President Barack Obama gave a speech on energy security at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington. In it, Obama offered what might be called a “grand compromise” on energy—in exchange for expanded offshore drilling, including in previously untouched areas like north Alaska and the Atlantic, he called for [...]
