Economic Policy

We all know that the Washington Post editors and most of it columnists want to cut Social Security, but serious papers try to keep a separation between these editorial views and the content of news stories: not the Washington Post. According to an article in today’s paper, the country faces a severe budget crisis: “At […]

That’s the word from an immigration lawyer quoted in an NYT article on immigration reform. According to the lawyer, because of Canada’s point system, which favors more highly educated immigrants “we have some professionals, like doctors, who perform low-skill occupations such as driving taxis until they can find more appropriate work. ” Wow, Canada has […]

The Washington Post had an editorial on immigration today telling readers that “immigration equals growth.” Well, duh, other things equal, if immigration increases the U.S. workforce by 10 percent, it would be really amazing if it didn’t increase GDP by at least a little. The questions that serious people would ask is whether it increases […]

A NYT column on the impact of illegal immigrant workers on the economy framed the question as: “To some people, they represent a black-market work force that is lowering the wages of legal immigrants and native-born Americans. To others, they are an essential part of several big industries. What’s the truth?” Well it seems to […]

The coverage of the May employment numbers put far too bright a spin on the data in the report. For example the NYT article was headlined “Several Signs the Economy is Reviving.” The Post told readers that “Job Growth Strengthens the Economy.” Admittedly this was a tough report to read — 157,000 jobs isn’t bad […]

The May employment report showed that the economy added 157,000 jobs for the month, somewhat more than most economists (myself included) had expected. Given the weakness of the economy in the first quarter, and mostly weak data in the subsequent two months, this number should be viewed with some suspicion. The most obvious cause of […]

Washington Post columnist Steven Pearlstein gets much of the story right in his column on electricity deregulation, although he is too generous to its proponents. Deregulation can perhaps best be seen as a case of consumer fraud concealed as “free market” ideology. The basic story is that the existing regulatory structure had locked in a […]

The NYT tells us that “most economists agree that the economy probably bottomed out in the first three months of the year and they have forecast a rebound.” That is a bit less reassuring that it may first sound, since these same “most economists” never expected growth to dip to 0.6 percent in the first […]

The NYT reports that President Bush wants to double the appropriation for treating AIDS in the developing world to $30 billion over the next 5 years. This is an impressive increase, if his successor follows through on it. Of course, its impact will be reduced substantially if the U.S. pushes the use of patent protected […]

The NYT took the time to point out that if you constructed a price weighted S.& P. 500, instead of the actual capitalization weighted index, it would be about 90 percent above its 2000 peak. This is interesting trivia, but not of any obvious relevance to anything. It would have been far more reasonable for […]