Any way you cut it, the Labor Department’s announcement that the U.S. economy added just 115,000 jobs in April is a disappointment. Economists had been expecting 160,000 new jobs, and even that number is far below the kind of growth our economy needs to get back to full strength in the near term. At the same time, the unemployment rate [...]
Economy
Word now comes that Great Britain has slipped back into recession after several years of David Cameron’s austerity experiment. It seems, yet again, that John Maynard Keynes has been proven right. Real Keynesianism–government deficit spending–is essential when economies go bottom up. This can mean more government programs or lower taxes, or a combination of the two. [...]
In the Monday, April 9, New York Times piece on American Crossroads’ plans to provide heavy air support for Mitt Romney while he resupplies for the general election, the super PAC’s president, Steven J. Law, makes an unusual statement: Mr. Law said Crossroads research suggests that Mr. Obama’s campaign has started to gain traction among [...]
March’s unemployment numbers were mediocre enough to be open to any number of interpretations. Republicans see evidence that the President’s policies have taken us off track. Obama just called it another bump in the road. Here are two reasons to despair and two reasons to celebrate about the latest data:
If it’s true, as Rick Perry said, that the Federal Reserve was juicing the economy as part of a “treasonous” plot to re-elect Barack Obama, then the plot seems to have, er, thinned. One reason for the Dow’s big fall yesterday was the release of minutes from the Federal Reserve’s last meeting, suggesting that Ben [...]
Back in December of 2010 when Congress was faced with the imminent expiration of the Bush tax cuts, Democrats and Republicans made a pretty straight-forward tradeoff. President Obama would allow extended lower rates on top-tier income, anathema to liberals, in order to secure a moderately sized economic booster shot. The “Stealthy Stimulus,” as some dubbed [...]
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 [...]
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.
