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Largest Decline in State and Local Jobs Since Korean War
According to Floyd Norris at Economix. Norris includes this chart, comparing our ongoing shedding of state and local government jobs to the one in the early ’80s: I haven’t been looking at any employment reports lately, but I can only assume that this has sparked a massive boom in private payrolls.
Blog
If You Care About the Deficit, You Should Care About Jobs
The prevailing anxieties of elite opinion are focused relentlessly on the deficit and debt, with sporadic bouts of indigestion reserved for the slump in jobs. This is a complete reversal of what ought to be the case. But let’s say you really can’t get over the idea that there’s no major short-term economic problem currently [...]
Blog
Are the Big Banks Insolvent?
Let’s look at the reasons to doubt that the big six are solvent. 1.The economy is tanking. Real estate prices are not recovering, indeed, they continue to fall on trend. No jobs are being created. Defaults and delinquencies are not improving. GDP growth is falling. Isn’t it strange that Wall Street has managed to remain [...]
Blog
Bernanke Scraps Bold Congress Testimony for Lukewarm Version
By Gal Noir* In his Congressional testimony on October 4th, Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke uncharacteristically praised the benefits of fiscal policy, calling it “of critical importance” and conveying concerns with the looming deficit reductions. He cautioned: “an important objective is to avoid fiscal actions that could impede the ongoing economic recovery.” Many economists expressed worry [...]
Blog
Beyond Tweedledum and Tweedledee Economics
James Galbraith talks about the mechanisms by which obstacles are placed in the way of dissenting and original voices in economics, as well as the failure of most in the forefront of the profession to see the global financial crisis coming (via INET): Galbraith has written about this before; surveying the work of those who [...]
Working Paper No. 690
The Measurement of Time and Income Poverty
Official poverty thresholds are based on the implicit assumption that the household with poverty-level income possesses sufficient time for household production to enable it to reproduce itself as a unit. Several authors have questioned the validity of the assumption and explored alternative methods to account for time deficits in the measurement of poverty. I critically […]
Working Paper No. 689
Effects of Legal and Unauthorized Immigration on the US Social Security System
Immigration is having an increasingly important effect on the social insurance system in the United States. On the one hand, eligible legal immigrants have the right to eventually receive pension benefits but also rely on other aspects of the social insurance system such as health care, disability, unemployment insurance, and welfare programs, while most of […]
Blog
The Most Subversive Sign Seen at the “Occupy Wall Street” Protest
(continued at EconoMonitor)
Blog
Tabula Rasa
“We’ve put this off for too long. We need debt relief and jobs and until we get these two things, I think recovery is impossible”—Randall Wray, quoted in a Reuters article examining the possibility of negotiating massive consumer debt relief. Although household borrowing has been declining, debt burdens remain sky high: (from the latest Levy [...]
Blog
Flirting with MMT in the Financial Times
Martin Wolf, in the Financial Times last week, “thinks the unthinkable” and inches toward what sounds distinctly like a Modern Money Theory approach: “Alternatively, the government could fund itself from the central bank, directly. Better still, the government could increase its deficits, perhaps by slashing taxes, and taking needed funds from the central bank. Under [...]
Blog
Ponzi Encore
“It may come as a surprise to some, but the original scheme by Charles Ponzi did not make its money by providing seven decades of benefits to retirees before folding up shop and leaving town with a suitcase full of cash,” writes Benjy Sarlin. In a new One-Pager Greg Hannsgen and Dimitri Papadimitriou display just [...]
One-Pager No. 13
Social Security Data Belie Loopy Claims of a Fraud
Research Scholar Greg Hannsgen and President Dimitri B. Papadimitriou disprove claims made by Social Security skeptics that the program is nothing more than a “Ponzi scheme.”