Some Obama opponents are struggling to find a cloud in the silver lining of January’s jobs numbers, which estimated that there was a 243,000-job boost and a big drop in the unemployment rate, from 8.5% to 8.3%, last month. …
Economy
The Most Important Number Update: Not Quite Good News For Obama, Yet
A couple of weeks back, I explained the historic importance of economic growth, and more particularly disposable income growth, in predicting presidential election results. When incomes are rising, incumbent parties tend to get reelected. When they are static or falling, incumbent parties tend to lose.
On Monday, the Bureau of …
November Job Numbers: What Are We Missing?
Obama and the Imperceptible Recovery
Friday’s jobs report offered yet more evidence of an infuriatingly glacial recovery. The U.S. economy added 80,000 jobs in October, nudging unemployment down one tenth of a percent to 9.0%. Economic minds wiser than mine observed …
The Real Debate: 2012 and Beyond
The New York Times op-ed page has two excellent columns today, by Tom Friedman and Ross Douthat that should define the most important national debate in the coming year–about the role of banks (Friedman) and the government (Douthat) in our economic future. Should, but probably won’t, because the national IQ tends to plummet in election …
Class Warfare: The Middle Class Is Losing
Peggy Noon today picks up a theme, recently invoked by David Brooks, which has become a relentless Republican talking point on the presidential stump: Barack Obama is a divider or, as Newt Gingrich inimitably put it to a crowd in Davenport, Iowa, which I report in my print column this week: “The President is a sincere believer in class …
The Unemployed Aren’t Victims of Discrimination. They’re Victims of a Lousy Economy.
It will not surprise my loyal fans—Hey, Dad!—that I like President Obama’s jobs bill. It’s a second stimulus, and when I haven’t been flacking the first, I’ve been kvetching for more. When unemployment is 9% and federal borrowing is practically free, it’s time to pay construction workers who need jobs to fix schools that …
Census Data Show Poverty’s Creep, Lasting Effects of Recession
The Census Bureau’s Tuesday report that nearly 46.2 million Americans — one in six citizens — live in poverty shouldn’t be entirely surprising given that economic conditions have continued to worsen in the more than two years since the Great Recession officially ended.
The Gaping Hole in Obama’s Economic Plan: Housing
Obama’s plan for boosting the economy may seem huge—he proposed $447 billion in tax breaks and spending in his speech on Thursday night—but according to some economists, none of it will work until the problem that caused the …
Alan Krueger: Obama’s New Top Economist
President Obama’s selection of Alan Krueger as the new chairman of his Council of Economic Advisors (CEA) comes as the president prepares to launch a jobs program to tame a 9.1% unemployment rate that could thwart his …
Stay In School, Kids: A Look At Unemployment By Education
Things are bad, but they are much worse if you didn’t go to college. Below is a quick rendering of the U.S. unemployment rate, as a percentage of total working population, for people over the age of 25 with different levels of educational attainment. As you can see, this economic collapse has only made the spreads scarier. Want a job? …
What Washington Can — and Won’t — Do About Market Fears
The 6% stock-market sell-off on Monday elicited hopes from Wall Street that Washington would do something to reassure the world that it is serious about its mounting debt and determined to reinvigorate the stalled recovery. …
Standard & Poor’s Embarrassing U.S. Debt Downgrade
S&P’s downgrade of U.S. sovereign debt from AAA to AA+ though symbolically and politically powerful, was already destined to be met with skepticism in New York and DC. The fact that the beleaguered rating agency managed to make …
