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 tax hikes. This weekend I …
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 we might kill two birds with …
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 …
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 the final stretch of its …
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 there would be fewer …
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:
Sen. Blanche Lincoln’s proposal for derivatives reform is apparently so extreme that even the Treasury Department thinks it goes too far. And yet, increasingly, it looks like it might survive. The FT is now reporting that Paul Volcker might be onboard. So are two Federal Reserve bank presidents. The shift, it seems, has at least …
The political back-and-forth over whether or not BP should pay out a second-quarter dividend has been a sight to behold. Considering how the most recent two American presidents have been in a position to tell CEOs of the some of the largest U.S. finance and auto companies what to do—take this TARP money, get rid of your CEO—it feels …
Bill is busy blogging about soccer for the next few weeks, so let me step in to be the one outraged by the way airlines are treating us now. As my colleagues Richard Zoglin and Christine Lim report:
One category of flyer is still getting the shaft this summer: the estimated 120 million U.S. travelers who are members of airline frequent
…
Back in 2008, when Barack Obama was running for President, he took a politically unpopular stand on the gas tax. Both John McCain and Hillary Clinton were calling for a gas-tax “holiday” to stimulate the economy. Obama took the side of most economists (not to mention our very own Justin Fox) in saying that a lower gas tax might play well …
UPDATE: My colleague Austin Ramzy has written a story on this topic. You can read it here.
This morning the New York Times is the latest to ring in with an article about rising wages in China:
The salaries of factory workers in China are still low compared to those in the United States and Europe: the hourly wage in southern China is
…
Commenters here had a number of things to say in response to Chicago economist Raghu Rajan’s thoughts about the (ongoing) causes of financial and economic strain in the global economy. So folks might also be interested to know that Rajan himself is now blogging. You can read his blog here, presumably for at least as long as his book …
