With the economic troubles of the past few years, it’s no surprise that the number of people using food stamps is soaring. The U.S. Department of Agriculture reports that an average of 44 million people were on food assistance last year; that’s up from 17 million in 2000. What might be surprising, though, is one…
Category: Economy
America’s Future Under ‘Drill, Baby, Drill’
The promise of abundant oil jobs was dangled before us as an incentive—despite the fact that clean energy industries were some of the only sectors to show strong growth at the height of the Great Recession, and 3.1 million jobs in the United States were associated with the production of green goods and services in…
Nearly Two-Thirds Of Private-Sector Jobs Added In Last 50 Years Came Under Democratic Presidents
Republicans have made a show of their supposed job creation efforts over the past three years, decrying “job killing” regulations and taxes on “job creators.” They have a web site — 4jobs.gov — devoted to their job creation agenda and have even named legislation the JOBS Act. They have also slammed President Obama, saying that…
CHARTS: Austerity In Europe Hasn’t Worked
Indeed, the French vote, alongside elections in Greece in which voters abandoned pro-austerity parties in droves in favor of extremists, was a stark reminder that voters have no patience with forced economic sacrifice that isn’t paired with efforts to boost growth and create jobs. And here are three charts showing that the austerity policies adopted…
America’s Corporations Made A Record $824 Billion Last Year, As Conservatives Claim Obama Is Anti-Business
A favorite conservative attack on President Obama is that his policies — and even his personality — amount to an assault on American businesses. “President Obama himself is the most anti-business president in my lifetime. With rhetoric not befitting a president he has attacked oil companies, banks, airplane users, Wall Street and anyone who makes…
Government Is Getting Smaller in the U.S.
Spending by the federal government, adjusted for inflation, has risen at a slow rate under President Obama. But that increase has been more than offset by a fall in spending by state and local governments, which have been squeezed by weak tax receipts. In the first quarter of this year, the real gross domestic product…
Private-Sector Jobs Bounce Back Under Obama
In the first year of President Barack Obama’s term, the country lost about 4.2 million private-sector jobs. But as of last month there are now more private-sector jobs in the United States than there were in January 2009, when President Obama took office. You read that right. Since bottoming out in early 2010, the country…
Jobs Growth Continues in April, but Congress Needs to Help Make Sure It Lasts
The economy continues to move in the right direction. It added 115,000 jobs in April, and data for February and March were revised upward by a total of 53,000 jobs. April marks the 26th straight month of gains in private-sector employment, for a total of 4.2 million private-sector jobs. This month’s growth is not…
U.S. health care spending ‘dwarfs’ that of other countries
The United States spends more on health care than 12 other industrialized countries, a new Commonwealth Fund study finds – but that doesn’t mean this country’s care is any better. The U.S. spent nearly $8,000 per person for health care services in 2009, the study found, confirming that “health care spending in the U.S. dwarfs…
Yes, Bush’s economy was terrible
Of the more negative responses to today’s column, the one that’s been most common was the one I was least prepared for: The Bush economy, my correspondents say, was actually pretty good! As one reader e-mailed, “A stock market bordering 14,000, gas prices around $2-2.5/gal, a deficit in the low billions, an unemployment rate of…
Amer. Cancer Society Chief: ‘The System Really Is Not Failing … Failure Is The System’
When I hear the politicians talk about death panels and rationing, we need to be talking about rational use of medicine. Not rationing but rational. And unfortunately that is not happening in the United States. There is this drug called Prilosec. Suppresses acid in the stomach. Great drug. AstraZeneca only had one problem. Eighteen-year patent….
Big Oil’s Mighty First-Quarter Profits
Together the big five oil companies—BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Shell—earned a combined $33.5 billion, or $368 million per day, during the first quarter of 2012. Recall that these companies made a combined record profit of $137 billion in 2011, mostly due to high oil and gasoline prices. Their ongoing huge earnings mean that these…
President Obama Makes an Argument for Rebuilding America
Speaking to 3,000 attendees of the Building and Construction Trades Department conference in Washington, DC this morning, President Obama made an argument for investing in rebuilding America. He told the crowd: [As] a share of the economy, Europe invests more than twice what we do in infrastructure; China about four times as much. Are we…
A world of zombie economic policies — policies that should have been killed
The good news is that many influential people are finally admitting that the confidence fairy was a myth. The bad news is that despite this admission there seems to be little prospect of a near-term course change either in Europe or here in America, where we never fully embraced the doctrine, but have, nonetheless, had…
CHART OF THE DAY: US Vs. UK Growth
Now the first thing to note is that the US has recovered WAY better than either the Eurozone or the UK. So if you think Obama has been a disaster, you might first acknowledge that the US has performed better than all its major Western peers. But beyond that, check out the UK line. The…
Do voters really flee high-tax states?
The CBPP study argues that taxes are often much less significant than housing costs. For example, between 2004 and 2007, Arizona was the most popular destination for outgoing Californians. But it’s not clear that this was due to taxes. Indeed, many middle-income and upper-middle-income families actually faced higher local taxes in Arizona. More likely, many…
The Federal Tax Code and Income Inequality
From 1979 to 2007 there were a number of major tax changes, but the cumulative effect was to render the federal tax code less progressive and therefore less able to dampen income inequality. By one measure of inequality, the federal tax code in 2007 was about one-third less effective at reducing income inequality than it…
The Health Care Law is Helping Small Businesses
Small businesses are the engine of the American economy. Over the past 17 years, they have generated 65 percent of all net jobs and today the 27.5 million small businesses in the U.S. employ about half of all private sector workers. The Affordable Care Act is helping fix a health care market that has been…
The Richest 1 Percent Get More, Pay Less
The effective federal tax rate of the richest 1 percent of Americans has plummeted even while their incomes have skyrocketed, as the chart below shows. Households in the top 1 percent more than doubled their incomes from an average of more than $800,000 in 1993 to nearly $1.9 million in 2007. During that same period,…
Romney Adviser Struggles To Defend Campaign’s Major Economic Claim
Gillespie doesn’t even attempt to defend the substance of the claim because there is little substance to it. The 92 percent figure obscures the fact that many more men than women lost jobs in the recession, as Wallaces forces Gillespie to admit. The key is timing. Men tend to be concentrated in industries that were…