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11 minutes ago
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Inflation is Quiet, So Why are People Still Feeling its Pain?
This week’s report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows no change in the seasonally adjusted U.S. consumer price index for April. Real average hourly earnings were also unchanged. On the face of it, those numbers should take inflation off the list of things people have to worry about, but they don’t. Instead, every time [...]
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How the Latin Triangle Swallowed the Euro
Back in 1996, Rudiger Dornbusch wrote a paper about the political economy of exchange rates in Latin America. He called it “The Latin Triangle”. It describes a cycle in which governments become trapped in inappropriate fixed-exchange rates that inevitably end unhappily. Latin America has put that particular form of economic instability behind it, but a [...]
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Looking for the Good News in the April Jobs Report
The April jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics is not a strong one. Most comments have focused on the bad news, especially the modest 115,000 increase in payroll jobs. If you look hard, there is some good news, too, although not as much or as easy to find as we would like. Start [...]
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Fracking and the Environment: An Economic Perspective
When people look at “fracking”—the production of natural gas through hydraulic fracturing techniques–they see different things. Critics see polluted wells, exploding houses, and earthquakes—an environmental disaster in the making. These anti-frackers have a simple solution: ban it. In contrast, industry supporters see hydraulic fracturing as a safe technology that drillers have been using for decades [...]
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US GDP Data: Private Sector Grows 2.8% in Q1 2012, Government Continues to Shrink
The private sector of the U.S. economy grew at a 2.8 percent annual rate in the first quarter of 2012, according to yesterday’s advance estimate from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Overall growth of real GDP was 2.2 percent, pulled down by the continuing shrinkage of the government sector. Consumption spending contributed 2.04 percentage points [...]
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The Charitable Deduction as a Tax Expenditure: What it Buys and What to Do About It (Part 2)
In the first part of this post, I argued that the charitable deduction is popular because people perceive it as a reduction in taxes that encourages charitable giving, but that perception rest on false premises. The charitable deduction is better viewed as a tax expenditure than as a tax reduction; surprisingly little of it goes [...]
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The Charitable Deduction as a Tax Expenditure: What it Buys and What to Do About It (Part 1)
In size, the tax deduction for charitable contributions ranks sixth on the dirty-dozen list of tax loopholes, far behind deductions for employer-paid health care or home mortgage interest. In popularity, though, it probably ranks first. Perhaps that is because so many people think it really is what it purports to be: a reduction in taxes [...]
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Latest Inflation Data Show Little Sign that Gasoline Prices are Derailing the Recovery
Recently many commentators have worried that rising gasoline prices will derail the fragile recovery of the U.S. economy. The latest inflation report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows little sign that any such thing is happening yet. The headline all-items CPI for urban consumers rose at a 3.54 percent annual rate in March, down [...]
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What Happened When Poland’s Fixed Exchange Rate Experiment Failed: Lessons for a Euro Divorce
In a recent paper, Arnab Das and Nouriel Roubini compare exit from the euro area to a divorce. (See long form here, short form here.) When we hear that friends are heading for the divorce court, two questions immediately come to mind. Why did this arrangement, which seemed like a good idea at the time, [...]
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Latest Jobs Data Show Employment Ratio Remains Low: Why Legalizing Marijuana Would Help it Recover
The U.S. job numbers for March, released today, show moderate, although not spectacular short-term gains: 120 thousand new payroll jobs, unemployment rate down a notch to 8.2 percent. Long-term indicators are less healthy. In particular, as the chart shows, the employment-population ratio fell by 0.1 percent and remains just a fraction above the all-time low [...]
