Economics Topics

The recovery from the Great Recession has been slow and unsteady. Two years after unemployment peaked at 10.1%, it still remains over 9%, in contrast to the under 5% in 2007. GDP has grown very slowly during the past year, and is now more than 10% below its ...

The President’s “Jobs” speech to a joint session of Congress on September 8 was notably forceful and, I am guessing, politically adroit. It may help to save at least one job—his own. But the question I want to address is, assuming that all his recommendations were enacted by ...

The real takeaway from President Barack Obama's jobs agenda?

Workers probably can count on continuing ...

Via Greg Mankiw I see Steve Allen’s got a plan for jobs

The numbers [for the new stimulus package] are sobering: $233k per job for the payroll tax cuts and $350k per job for the infrastructure spending.� And these jobs would only be around for the duration of the ...

President Barack Obama’s latest set of proposals to get employers hiring more readily has stimulated one thing already: critiques, analyses and defenses of the strategy and its components. To get beyond the ...

This bit from Bruce Yandle challenges the conventional wisdom:

As to hiring teachers, total employment in local government education is already up by one million workers since August 2010. Teacher employment in state government nationwide is up 300,000 workers. The unemployment rate in education and health services at 6.3% is ...

8.4%: Where Okun’s law suggests the unemployment rate should be.

Even when you consider the shoddy state of the economy, companies’ have shown a remarkable reluctance to hire, according to a rule of thumb first framed by economist Arthur Okun in the early 1960s.

BARACK OBAMA'S jobs ideas are fairly reasonable, but presidents are faced with all sorts of checks on their power. How likely is it that his speech will yield an actual new stimulus?

A public appeal by a president is associated with an enacted appropriations that is 11-16 percentage points ...

Scott Winship, at his new Brookings gig, reports:

The bleak outlook for jobseekers has three immediate sources.  The sharp deterioration beginning in early 2007 is the most dramatic feature of the above chart (the rise in job scarcity after point C in the chart, the steepness of which depends on ...

There has been a lot of praise about Obama’s jobs speech that he delivered last night, both in style and in substance. I thought the style was just fine, and has set Obama up in a position where he can clearly smack Republicans in the general election should they ...

For the time being the Republicans have been deferential to Obama’s speech. This will not last, say our correspondents

THE press is wall-to-wall coverage of President Obama's jobs speech�(and that includes us), so I may as well chime in with my thoughts on the matter. I don't know about the politics. Mr Obama seemed to frame his jobs plan in a savvy fashion, and there ...

When you get right down to it, the jobs plan President Obama proposed before a joint session of Congress last night was built on three elements:  A large payroll tax cut, lots of new spending on public infrastructure, and a promise that its $447 billion cost would be paid for with ...

Aaron Blake and Chris Cillizza write in The Fix that President Obama almost granted me one of my wishes last evening. "There was a word missing from President Obama's jobs speech Thursday night: 'stimulus.'"� Their statement reminded me of something I wrote in December 2008 ...

We're going to close out our series this week on the jobs situation in the United States with a historical look at the percentage of all working Americans who are working part time for economic reasons.

After a summer in which the economy seemed to slow down further week by week, President Obama told Congress last night that it needed to pass his $447 Billion jobs plan right away or he’d take his ...

Obama's jobs plan was "bigger and bolder than expected':

Setting Their Hair on Fire, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times: First things first: I was favorably surprised by the new Obama jobs plan, which is significantly bolder and better than I expected. It’s not nearly as bold ...

Economists and others weigh in with some early reactions to the president’s jobs proposal.

–President Obama’s newly proposed $450 billion job creation bill is equivalent to nearly 3% of GDP, so if it was passed by Congress as it stands it would certainly have a significant impact on ...

AS JOB growth has ground to a halt and stock markets have swooned, the outlook for both the American economy and Barack Obama’s presidency has dimmed. The jobs package he unveiled in a much anticipated speech before Congress on September 8th was a calculated attempt to resuscitate both.�His “American ...

This quote from the New York Times article on the president’s speech, highlights everything wrong with macroeconomics as practiced in the public domain:

Preliminary analyses of the White House plan estimate that the tax cuts could create more than 50,000 jobs a month, a significant boost considering that employment climbed ...

Surprisingly, I did (I usually prefer to read the criticism), and this part got more of my attention than the rest, especially after the smog regs were not implemented:

President Obama’s big jobs speech Thursday takes an apparent shot at GOP efforts to scale back environmental regulations.

It ...

The President laid out a series of policy measures in today’s speech which are, by textbook standards, entirely reasonable. And yet, many have been declared by the pundits to be DOA. I’ll leave the assessment of political feasibility to others, but the very fact that these specific measures

Welcome to the season of jobs plans. GOP presidential hopeful Jon Huntsman offered his last week. President Obama will propose his before Thursday night’s football game.  But today is GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney’s day. And at least when it comes to tax policy, he veers a bit ...

President Obama addressed a joint session of Congress this evening, proposing a $447 billion jobs package titled the American Jobs Act. The plan includes a number of tax changes. Below are the President's references to taxes in his speech:

[The American Jobs Act] will provide a tax ...

Here's my reaction to the speech:

Obama's Jobs Speech: Bolder Than Expected

What did you think?

So I haven’t seen the speech but I can tell from the chatter that the President is pushing for an extension of the payroll tax cut. Obviously I am very much in favor of this.

I also see that he is looking for tax incentives for businesses that hire new workers. ...

Professor Casey B. Mulligan calculates that 16 year-old workers have fared worse than any other age group during the great recession from 2007 to 2010. The average 16 year-old worked 40% fewer hours in 2010 than 2007. For most age groups the fall in hours worked for ...

David Altig has questions:

Another cut at the postrecession job picture, macroblog: There is not much to be said about the August employment report released last Friday—or not much good, anyway. The ongoing updates at Calculated Risk provide a chronicle of the questions and challenges that ...

I am sending this Congress a plan that you should pass right away. It’s called the American Jobs Act. There should be nothing controversial about this piece of legislation. Everything in here is the kind of proposal that’s been ...

Dave Schuler links to this piece by Catherine Baum that I think pretty much summarizes what we’ll be hearing from the President tonight:

Let’s face it: If the president had a plan to ...

Expect one thing from President Obama’s speech on Thursday: a mini ARRA, a smaller version of essentially the same stimulus plan as that of 2009. He will probably call for putting the unemployed construction workers to work on infrastructure projects, he will propose tax incentives to firms to hire ...

At MoneyWatch:

Obama's Speech: What are the Best Policies to Help the Unemployed?

The bottom line: "I am not very confident that anything will make it through Congress in this political climate. So the final recommendation is for�the White House to take whatever steps it can on its ...

A new report estimates that the U.S. unemployment rate is 0.6 percentage point higher due to the extension of jobless benefits.

The biggest rap on extended unemployment benefits is that they discourage people from going out and finding work. Their skills erode, the government is saddled with higher costs, and the ...

LAST night, contenders for the Republican nomination for the American presidency gathered to debate. Among the topics covered, the economy received particular attention, and the leading contenders went out of their way to tout their job-creation records. This made for a few moments of cognitive dissonance, as candidates who ...

More than a year ago, New York Times columnist David Brooks raised eyebrows on the right when he appeared to endorse the Obama Administration’s “Green Jobs” initiative and the idea of investing government funds to create jobs ...

According to a recent Nanos poll conducted for the Globe and Mail, after health care, the economy/jobs is the top concern of Ontario voters this fall election.� Ontario voters may be interested on how employment growth has fared in their particular neck of the woods under various political regimes.�

Small businesses drive the growth of the U.S. job market.

So with today's unemployment rate over nine percent, which the ...

In the week ending September 3, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 414,000, an increase of 2,000 from the previous week's revised figure of 412,000. The 4-week moving average was 414,750, an increase of 3,750 from the previous week's revised average of 411,000.

The number of job openings in July was 3.2 million, little changed from June. Although the number of job openings remained below the 4.4 million openings when the recession began in December 2007, the level in July was 1.1 ...

Forty-eight hours from now we’ll be pouring through the details of the President’s jobs speech, such as it is, but it doesn’t sound like his fellow Democrats are very optimistic:

President Obama’s new effort to revive the ailing ...

Brad DeLong:

...What in most important is not just what Obama proposes on Thursday (because nothing will get done by congress), but rather what he does in the weeks and months afterwards to actually tune the economy so that it creates more jobs. I think Obama ...

A corporate tax holiday for U.S. multinationals could create about 2.9 million jobs – roughly the same amount as the 2009 stimulus legislation – according to a new study sponsored by backers of the idea. And it would come at only a small fraction of the cost to the government, ...

Paul Osternman, who is in the Sloan School of Management at MIT writes in the New York Times (HT: Real Clear Politics):

On Thursday, President Obama will deliver a major speech on America’s employment crisis. But too often, what is lost in the call for job creation is a ...

Brad DeLong:

...What in most important is not just what Obama proposes on Thursday (because nothing will get done by congress), but rather what he does in the weeks and months afterwards to actually tune the economy so that it creates more jobs. I think Obama ...

In this earlier post about the upcoming speech of President Obama, I wrote:

What I’d like him to say is the same thing I wanted him to say in January of 2009. My druthers haven’t moved at all.

What I wrote in January of 2009 was this piece. The gist ...

There is only one thing worse than having trouble finding shovel-ready projects when a Keynesian mind-set is afoot in the land. That’s having lots of projects that are easy to start. Here is an old (Feb 2009) New York Times article on what happened in Japan:

HAMADA, Japan — The ...

Tyler Cowen digs this rather depressing number out of a post by John Mauldin:

The US has roughly the same number of jobs today as it had in 2000, but the population is well over 30,000,000 larger. To get to a civilian employment-to-population ratio equal to that in 2000, ...

What I’d like him to say is the same thing I wanted him to say in January of 2009. My druthers haven’t moved at all.

Time to change the conversation:

The Fatal Distraction, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times: Friday brought two numbers that should have everyone in Washington saying, “My God, what have we done?”

One of these numbers was zero — the number of jobs created in August. The other ...

The US has roughly the same number of jobs today as it had in 2000, but the population is well over 30,000,000 larger. To get to a civilian employment-to-population ratio equal to that in 2000, we would have to gain some 18 MILLION jobs.

Here is more.  People will differ, ...

There will probably be some "bounce back" for both men and women (some of the recent decline is probably cyclical), but the long term trend for men is ...

The last time black unemployment was this high Barack Obama was fresh out of college.

CNN Money (“Black unemployment: Highest in 27 years“):

Black unemployment surged to 16.7% in August, its highest level ...

The Bureau of Labor Statistics released some less than stellar job numbers today:

Nonfarm payroll employment was unchanged (0) in August, and the unemployment rate held at 9.1 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Employment in most major industries changed little over the month. Health ...

Some Democrats are pushing to make job creation a top priority for the congressional supercommittee that is focused on the very different task of reducing government budget deficits.

Thomas Masterson and Pavlina Tcherneva were interviewed by the Huffington Post for an article on job creation policy.  Tcherneva discussed the idea of a modern-day WPA, echoing a call she made at the outset of the Obama administration (in this policy note) for the government to ...

Economists and others weigh in on the unchanged nonfarm payrolls number and steady 9.1% unemployment rate.

–The stagnation in payroll employment is an ominous sign. The monthly gain in payrolls has now been below 100,000 for four consecutive months and the unemployment rate has been stuck at around ...

The Wall Street Journal has the byline of two reporters over the Wisconsin-related story "Democrats to end union standoff." The story relies to a substantial extent on the word of Wisconsin senate minority leader Mark Miller of the fleebag 14:

Sen. Mark Miller said he and his fellow ...

There is no doubt that the recent jobs report was weak, but its worth noting that its not that far off what we have been experiencing recently.

Private payrolls increased by 17K but 45K jobs were cut because of the Verizon strike. After accounting for the strike private employment grew ...

The U.S. jobless rate was flat at 9.1% in August, but the government’s broader measure of unemployment rose to 16.2%, ...

The nation’s unemployment rate was unchanged in August. In addition, virtually zero jobs were added to the economy. Jon Hilsenrath and Phil Izzo provide analysis with News Hub panelists Kelly Evans and David Reilly.

The number of jobs in the U.S. was reported as unchanged in August, and while that number will likely eventually be revised to a loss or a gain, the stagnation provides an apt metaphor for a stalled labor market where businesses are reluctant to hire.

The 0 number of jobs added ...

THIS morning, the Bureau of Labour Statistics released its statistics on August employment growth in America. There was none. The American economy added zero net new jobs in August.

We will have a full analysis up later this morning. I'll just point out that since the recession officially ended, the ...

Today’s employment report is dismal. It may not be fatal, but it’s the most discouraging update for jobs from the Labor Department since the Great Recession was formally declared dead and buried as of June 2009.

For the first time in 66 years, the monthly jobs report shows zero net jobs created in the month of August:

The US economy created no jobs and the unemployment rate held steadily higher at 9.1 percent in ...

The symbolism of today’s payrolls report — ZERO — would be bad enough even if it wasn’t coming out in advance of the Labor Day weekend. There’s a pattern here: no matter how bad Wall Street thinks the employment report is going to be, it always seems to be ...

Nonfarm payroll employment was unchanged (0) in August, and the unemployment rate held at 9.1 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Employment in most major industries changed little over the month. Health care continued to add jobs, and a decline in information ...

There’s another projection out for long-term unemployment, and there’s nothing good about it:

President Obama’s mid-session budget review confirms what most private and government projections have recently concluded — that the economy is considerably weaker than earlier forecasts ...