Here we go again: Japan stock market breaking down. It's earned a nap after 80% rise since Nov 13. Unfortunately it's dragging world down.
24 minutes ago
Category Archive: Fiscal policy
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Is the Chained CPI the Right Fix for Social Security?
One of the most controversial elements of President Obama’s 2014 budget is the proposal to reduce future cost-of-living adjustments to Social Security benefits by changing the inflation index. The Social Security Administration now bases inflation adjustments to on the consumer price index for urban wage earners and clerical workers (CPI-W), a close cousin of the [...]
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US GDP Growth Accelerates from a Crawl to a Walk in Q1
US GDP growth accelerated from a crawl to a walk in the first quarter of 2013, according to the advance estimate issued today by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The reported annual growth rate of 2.5 percent was just a bit faster than the average rate during the recovery, and much stronger than the 0.4 [...]
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Slovenia Is Not The Next Cyprus, but That Doesn’t Mean It’s Not in Trouble
Leo Tolstoy wrote that all happy families are alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Much the same is true of economies. Maybe that was what EU Commission President Jose Barosso had in mind when he said recently that, “it is a completely different situation in Cyprus and in Slovenia.” Different, [...]
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A Disappointing, Procyclical, and Highly Politicized Budget
The White House has officially unveiled its budget for fiscal year 2014. I hope to have a chance to look at some of the numbers and programs in depth over the coming weeks, but the overview alone confirms what many leaks have suggested, namely, that this is a disappointing, highly politicized document. Here are some [...]
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US Payroll Job Growth Slows; Unemployment Rate Drops as Labor Force Shrinks
The U.S. economy created a disappointing 88,000 payroll jobs in March, according to today’s report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That was down sharply from the 268,000 gain in February. The unemployment rate fell to 7.6 percent, a new low for the recovery, but even that was largely due to a drop in labor [...]
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Why Hasn’t the US become another Greece?
How many times have we heard the warning that if the government in Washington doesn’t change its ways, the United States could become another Greece? Three years ago, when the crisis in Greece was just getting underway, I wrote a post making some comparisons between Greek and U.S. fiscal performance, along with a separate slideshow [...]
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Ten Years on, New Estimates of the Economic Cost of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
This week marks the tenth anniversary of the American invasion of Iraq. What have the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan cost the United States to date? What additional bills will come due in the future? Economists and budget analysts have made many estimates since the early 2000s. Only one regularity has emerged from their work: [...]
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Q4 GDP Moves from Negative to Positive, but Details Show Recovery Still on Life Support
Today’s second estimate of U.S. GDP for the fourth quarter of 2012 showed growth moving from the -0.1 percent of the preliminary estimate to +0.1. Positive is better than negative, but a look at the details shows that the recovery is extremely weak. The following table shows how much each of the economy’s main sectors [...]
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Debt Sustainability, Growth, Interest Rates, and Inflation: Some Charts for Discussion and Some Inconvenient Truths for MMT
In a series of posts[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] over the last couple of months, fellow Economonitor blogger L. Randall Wray and I have been exploring the conditions under which the government’s debt can be said to be sustainable. Wray writes from the point of view of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), while I adopt a [...]
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Tax Incentives for Retirement Saving are not Working. Can we Find a Better Way? (Part 2)
In a previous post in this series, I criticized proposals to raise the eligibility age for Social Security and Medicare. It is already getting harder to save enough for a comfortable retirement; raising the eligibility age would just make it still more difficult. In this installment, I turn to policies to encourage retirement saving, explaining [...]
