Recovery from the Great Recession has been slow and extremely prolonged. It was tempting to conclude, at various points, that we had recovered as much as we were going to. Even after the official unemployment rate receded, other indicators of recovery remained much more mixed—the share of people employed remained well below pre-recession levels; wages…
Tag: economy
Household Incomes Remain Flat Despite Improving Economy – NYTimes.com
And how’s that recovery going? Inequality, poverty, incomes are all pretty much unchanged. This pretty much sums it up: “The good news from today’s 2012 income and poverty results is that for the first year since the Great Recession hit, things aren’t getting worse,” Jared Bernstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a…
What a Drag | Jared Bernstein | On the Economy
A simple and elegant statement of why balanced budget laws and cutting government spending aren’t necessarily economically responsible, even as they are touted as the height of fiscal responsibility. Unlike the feds, states have to balance their budgets every year, which means they either raise taxes or cut services. They haven’t done much on the…
Delegating Economic Policy to the Technocrats, and Away from Democracy (NYTimes.com)
The discourse of austerity often invokes the specter of the technocrat: fiscal crisis has often paved the way for “emergency” takeovers of urban governments, with lasting consequences for both cities and democracy. In Michigan, fiscal crisis may be used to legitimate the dissolution of Detroit’s elected government (on the heels of Flint and the Detroit…
As Public Sector Sheds Jobs, Blacks Are Hit Hardest
Pamela Sparks, a longtime postal worker in Baltimore, has several relatives at the Postal Service and worries about their jobs. Full article