The FY 2013 budget that the Administration will release today is, in the long run, a meaningless document in substantive terms, so I don’t want to spend that much time on it. But I was a little surprised with the pushback I received about my assessment that it reflects a shift in tone rather than [...]

Noam Scheiber has an excerpt of his new book on Obama’s economic policy in The New Republic. It focuses on 2011 and the series of bruising negotiations with Republicans over the deficit. And it includes the now-familiar internal White House struggles between deficit reduction and economic stimulus, with deficit reduction winning out through 2010 and [...]

The Congressional Budget Office released their latest budget and economic outlook for 2012. CBO outlooks are frequently wrong, so we shouldn’t read a whole lot into this. But there are a few nuggets worth pulling out. First, there really is no pressing deficit problem. While the FY 2012 deficit should clock in, according to CBO, [...]

Chart compiled by Paul Krugman showing decline in public investment by state and local governments since the 2008-2009 recession. Austerity is a major issue abroad, particularly Europe, but it has more to do with the sclerotic economic pace in the US than most people realize. Republicans successfully got spending caps that will ratchet down the [...]

Well, we won’t have the resolution of disapproval on the debt limit to kick around anymore. The Senate held their vote on the resolution, part of last August’s debt limit deal, and just like with the first tranche of funds, the Senate blocked the resolution by a vote of 52-44. Republicans did not even get [...]

I’m getting a little tired of these retrospectives of the Administration’s actions to deal with the economic crisis in 2009-2010, but Ryan Lizza has a new one in the New Yorker, and I wanted to pull out a few key points. First of all, let’s recognize that the narrator is sometimes unreliable. Lizza, after a [...]

For a while, I’ve been railing against the spectacle of trying to increase economic growth in Europe through austerity, and the myth of expansionary contraction. Not only do austerity measures in the midst of an economic crisis only widen and deepen the pain, but they frequently lead to a collapse in revenue, and an increase [...]

Yesterday, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that raising the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 67 would save the government $148 billion from 2012 to 2021. For context, letting the Bush tax cuts expire would save $3.6 trillion over the same ten-year window. So anyone who tells you that we must increase the Medicare age [...]

Maybe we need a “Ya Think?” of the day, going to the article that shows the best grasp of the obvious. If so, the article with the headline In Greece, fears that austerity is killing the economy would win: Deeply indebted and nearly bankrupt, this Mediterranean nation was forced to adopt tough austerity measures to [...]

The National Federation of Independent Businesses has updated their small business survey for December, and once again, the small businesses identify their major problem as “poor sales.” This has gone down somewhat over time, but it still ranks as the biggest problem small businesses face, ahead of taxes, regulations and everything else. As Bill McBride [...]

Paul Krugman today patiently explains that short-term accumulations of federal debt simply do not create the disastrous effects claimed by those who want to prevent any progressive economic policymaking. Perhaps most obviously, the economic “experts” on whom much of Congress relies have been repeatedly, utterly wrong about the short-run effects of budget deficits. People who [...]