For the better part of two years, Mitt Romney has been relentless. “Four years ago, candidate Obama came to Nevada, promising to help,” he said in his victory speech after the Nevada caucuses on Saturday night. “Today, Nevada unemployment is over 12%, home values have plummeted, and Nevada’s foreclosure rate is the highest in the [...]
Economy
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. Their biggest gripe focuses on the size of the labor force: As the unemployment rate has [...]
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 Economic Analysis released December’s income [...]
The White House got a big boost on Friday from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which released moderately positive jobs data for November and revised its October and September numbers higher, pushing the official unemployment rate down to 8.6% from 9%, the lowest level in two years.
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 some bright spots in the report. But the basic fact remains that while sputtering back into recession is unlikely, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 need [...]
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.
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 economic crisis to begin with is addressed: housing. “The recovery will never turn into an expansion that [...]
