Rethinking the Economy

How much is the insane obsession with deficits costing us? Krugman explains, using the latest projection from the Congressional Budget Office, which optimistically assumes that the economy will bounce back by 2015:
the projection says that we’ll have a cumulative output gap of $5.1 trillion, with $2.8 trillion of that having already happened.
Surely it [...]

[Read more →]

How’s the class war going for the right? Laura Clawson sums it up in four facts:
On Monday, Sen. Al Franken, Rep. Sander Levin, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, former New York Times columnist Bob Herbert and Center for American Progress economist Heather Boushey joined unemployed workers to discuss the jobs crisis.
What could they possibly have [...]

[Read more →]

As Monday’s post noted, one critical piece of turning state pension funds into guardians of the middle class is to make sure that they are as accountable as possible, and that requires transparency. But even if they make tons of data publicly available, how do they make it easy to make sense of it?
The [...]

[Read more →]

I finally got a chance today to take a look at the progressive plan for balancing the budget that EPI, Demos, and The Century Foundation put out on Monday. There are a lot of smart ideas in the proposal, and it shows that we can deal with long-term budget issues without beating the crap [...]

[Read more →]

Another smart, quick Dean Baker smackdown:
The NYT Doesn’t Know That We Have 15 Million People Unemployed
That is the only thing that readers can conclude from its heroic efforts to balance the budget in 2030. This exercise is utterly mind-boggling. We have more than 25 million people unemployed, underemployed, or who have given up [...]

[Read more →]

Via Bob Herbert, a Rockefeller Foundation study using a new index for measuring economic insecurity — the percent of Americans who had a net loss of 25% or more of their financial income — shows that for many Americans, life got less secure, not more over the last few decades:
In 1985, at a time [...]

[Read more →]

A nice, short explanation by Krugman of why the latest freak out over Social Security’s future makes no sense:
Social Security is a government program funded by a dedicated tax. There are two ways to look at this. First, you can simply view the program as part of the general federal budget, with the the [...]

[Read more →]

This week’s New York Times Magazine also had fascinating article about efforts to come up with an alternative to the GDP — i.e., how to put a number on how our country is doing. For years, economists and activists have criticized the GDP as a bad way to measure how we’re doing. For example, Katrina [...]

[Read more →]

A New York Times Magazine piece on Cass Sunstein, the legal scholar who now runs the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, explains how he’s trying to put numbers around the cost of climate change. But as the article shows, “cost” has as much to do with politics — with what’s feasible [...]

[Read more →]