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 …
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 done with the GSEs.
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 beer that has …
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 learned …
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 that’s …
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
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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 the web site in full form. So now, after much …
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 …
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 …
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 will …
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 to create the most of in …
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 Department found that “Black and Hispanic …