The White House wants you to believe that the American Jobs Act is loaded up with bipartisan solutions once preferred by Republicans. And to some extent, that’s true. But there are a number of Easter eggs in here, policy ideas that originated with liberal policy groups. The White House may be touting the bipartisan bona [...]

One of the stimulus ideas that Matt Stoller puts forward in his op-ed for Politico today is to turn Fannie and Freddie loose: One, the solution most cited now, is to use the government’s control of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to spark a refinancing boom, adding dramatically to consumer purchasing power. These entities could [...]

It’s a bit of genius that the New York Times delivers their story about businesses pushing for a repatriation tax holiday under the series headline “But Nobody Pays That.” Because that four-word title refutes just about everything in the article from the business perspective. Businesses talk about the high nominal corporate tax rate. “But Nobody [...]

Paul Krugman had a good column today on how America needed to end its “learned helplessness” on the jobs crisis. He cited multiple options of things the government could do right now to create jobs, which would of course increase government revenue and over time reduce the deficit. Among them were such ideas as a [...]

The Wall Street Journal scoops that Jared Bernstein, Joe Biden’s chief economist and the one person on the economic team seen as reliably liberal, will leave the White House soon. Mr. Bernstein, a liberal voice in an increasingly centrist White House, will join the liberal-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. He is also in [...]

Mark Zandi made the case in the New York Times today for an extension of all of the Bush tax cuts and a slow phase-out of the ones for the wealthiest Americans, on the premise that high-income earners are driving consumer spending right now, and the loss of that would damage the economy: In most [...]

A couple people I’ve talked to at the America’s Future Now conference were as stunned as I was by White House designated progressive Jared Bernstein walking out Tuesday before the end of his own panel on jobs and the economy, while NYT columnist Bob Herbert was speaking. The optics of this are completely ridiculous. Bernstein [...]

On a conference call this morning, Nancy Pelosi laid out a variety of strategies for job creation, and rejected the conventional wisdom that deficit reduction would be bigger goal at this time, saying, we’ll never have deficit reduction unless we have job creation.” “What I’ve told the members is that we have a lot of [...]