Judging the Governors
We attempted to identify the “governor effect” by comparing how state employment growth changed while a governor was in office with both national employment growth and the state’s employment growth ...
First Thoughts on Ryan-Murray
Based on the outline that a staffer e-mailed me a couple of hours ago, the Ryan-Murray budget deal makes a trade that most Republicans would likely prefer not to make. ...
The Roadmap
Back in the late 1980s, I was working at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Mass., while finishing my dissertation. At that time, I attended Harvard’s public-economics seminar, ...
Why the Good Jobs Report Should Worry the Obama Administration
Last month, the chattering classes were sent into a tizzy by the negative surprise from the March jobs report. Economists had expected that job creation would be about double the 88,000 ...
A Quick Guide to Budget Proposals
If Speaker Boehner has accomplished anything this year, it has been restoring order to American policymaking. Instead of being a series of back-room deals, the budget process is now set ...
Gene Sperling and ‘Regret’
The media universe is in a tizzy over the revelation that a White House official told Bob Woodward he would “regret” his coverage of the White House’s attempt to spin ...
Simpson-Bowles, Again
Earlier this morning, Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, former heads of President Obama’s deficit-reduction commission, released a new version of their much-discussed outline for reigning in the federal budget. This ...
Jobs Today
Today’s jobs report is a mild positive, with the headline number of 157,000 jobs created in January coming in close to the average rate of job creation we have seen ...
Think Again about That ‘Good’ Jobs Report
Today’s jobs report is a classic. The report, of course, reveals the results of two surveys, one of households, one of establishments. The professional economists and the press usually emphasize ...
The Stubbornest Tax
The first order of business for a Republican president next year should be corporate-tax reform. But even if Republicans win big in the fall, undoing America’s largest policy error will ...