With Spain’s official unemployment rate at 26 percent, and the economy projected to contract by 1.3 percent this year, it is difficult to make the case for continued austerity that could push a barely growing economy back into recession. Yet the government is committed to further fiscal...

This paper makes the case for a third stimulus package to in the face of economic indicators signaling that the economy is in a deeper downturn than was expected based on previous projections. Specifically, the report calls for an employer tax-credit for extending health care coverage and...

The new economic projections from the Congressional Budget Office show the economy remaining well below its potential level of output until 2014. The projections show the unemployment rate averaging 10.2 percent in 2010 and gradually edging down to the long-term sustainable rate of 4.8 percent...

Progressives need a fundamentally new approach to politics. They have been losing not just because conservatives have so much more money and power, but also because they have accepted the conservatives’ framing of political debates. They have accepted a framing where conservatives want market...

Some economic observers argue “structural unemployment” has increased in the wake of the Great Recession, but in this paper we find little support for either of two arguments that suggest that structural unemployment has been on the rise. The first argument focuses on the large increase in...

This paper compares the performance of the Mexican economy with that of the rest of the region over the past 20 years, based on the available economic and social indicators, and with its own past economic performance. Among the results it finds that Mexico ranks 18th out of 20 Latin American...

Economists are increasingly coming to the recognition that the current downturn is likely to be longer and more severe than they had expected at the time the last stimulus package was approved in February. As a result, there is likely to be interest in additional stimulus in order to boost the...

This report shows that the $787 billion included in the 2009 ARRA will not have as much of an immediate effect on the economy as initially anticipated. After subtracting the annual AMT patch and acounting for state level spending and tax cuts, the full effect of federal stimulus will equal a...

The unemployment rate is expected to average 10.2 percent for 2010, 9.1 percent for 2011, and 7.3 percent for 2012. With this in mind, this Issue Brief describes a job sharing tax credit, designed to provide a quick and substantial boost to the economy. It would use tax dollars to pay firms to...

This paper looks at the problem of state budget shortfalls during the recession and calculates the number of jobs that would be lost (nationally and by state) if states utilize pro-cyclical spending cuts in an attempt to balance their budgets. This is an update to an earlier paper from December...