This paper is focused on the options for reducing the U.S. fiscal deficit in the aftermath of the financial crisis. The first part of the paper is devoted to an assessment of the economic outlook and the impact of the financial crisis on the medium-term fiscal balance of the federal government....

American households have received a triple dose of bad news since the beginning of the current recession: The greatest collapse in asset values since the Great Depression, a sharp tightening in credit availability, and a large increase in unemployment risk. We present measures of the size of...

Public sector unions around the world are under threat from political forces. Combined, the financial crisis and austerity measures have challenged public sector unions’ legitimacy. In the U.S., the postrecession assault on public sector unions is rooted in political ideology, with not only a...

The business model used by Congress to pay for Social Security, Medicare and national debt is our costliest federal mandate. Because they run a national retirement plan without using compound interest, Congress makes us pay TWELVE dollars to do a ONE-dollar job. This business model is the root...

In this working paper, Resident Scholar Neil H. Buchanan statistically tests six alternative definitions of the federal budget deficit to determine if these definitions improve the results of econometric studies that use the deficit as an exogenous variable. Buchanan wishes to 1) evaluate how...

This paper argues that the usual framing of discussions of money, monetary policy, and fiscal policy plays into the hands of conservatives.That framing is also largely consistent with the conventional view of the economy and of society more generally. To put it the way that economists usually...