The official concept of “long-term unemployment,” while useful, is incomplete and, in some cases, even potentially misleading. As tracked by government statistics, the long-term unemployed are only a relatively small part of the population facing extended, sometimes permanent, spells without...

In this paper, we attempt to paint a demographic portrait of long-term hardship in the labor market. We display various measures of long-term hardship by race and gender, education, and age. In addition to the conventional long-term unemployment rate, we also show a broader measure that captures...

Following the most recent recession, an attempt has been made to explain current levels of unemployment as resulting from structural unemployment, or a mismatch between the skills of the unemployed and the types of jobs available. The evidence, however, indicates that the issue is actually a...

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...

Recently governments, economists, and international financial institutions have been debating the merits of further fiscal stimulus to combat the Great Recession versus fiscal austerity or “adjustment” – that is, higher taxes and/or lower government spending – to combat budget deficits....

With the economy suffering from near double-digit unemployment, public debate is dominated by concerns over the budget deficit and national debt. This discussion is unfortunate both because there is no reason for people to be concerned about the deficit at present, and more importantly, because...

At the peak of both the stock and housing bubbles, there were extraordinary shifts in the statistical discrepancy between the national output and income accounts. The statistical discrepancy fell from its normal range of 0.5 – 1.0 percent of GDP to levels below -1.0 percent of GDP. The...

There are many economists who argue that temporary tax cuts, like those in the 2009 stimulus and the ones proposed by President Obama last week, have no impact on the economy. They argue that people will save a temporary tax credit rather than spend it. Stanford Economics Professor John Taylor,...

There have been a number of proposals for replacing the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs), Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, with a system under which private financial institutions would issue mortgage-backed securities (MBS) that carry a government guarantee. This paper raises a number of...

There is currently $2.7 trillion in the Social Security Trust Fund, held in Treasury bonds. Since the program is currently taking in more revenues (taxes on payroll and benefits as well as interest on the bonds) than it is paying out, the Trust Fund will continue to grow to about $2.9 trillion....