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 [...]

Another solid jobs report ticked down the topline unemployment rate two notches to 8.3%. The economy added 243,000 jobs in January, with slight revisions upwards for November and December, and an annual benchmarking process also generally revised employment upward slightly. The topline unemployment rate has now gone from 9.1% in August to 8.3% in January, [...]

Despite the vulnerabilities of Scott Walker in the upcoming recall election, he also has plenty of advantages. It’s very difficult to recall a governor, it’s only been done twice in American history. Because of the rules governing the recall, Walker can continue to raise unlimited campaign funds until the date is set for the recall. [...]

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 [...]

First-time unemployment claims dropped sharply last week to 352,000, a drop of 50,000 from the previous week (the biggest one-week drop since September 2005). It’s important to point out that the moving four-week average, which is a lot less noisy, only dropped 3,000, to around a 379,000 weekly average. But that’s a lot better than [...]

The Obama Administration is going around telling liberal groups that they won’t much like the budget they’ll put forward at the end of the month. OF COURSE liberals won’t like this budget. It’s being produced under a spending cap. The spending cap necessarily cuts investment as a percentage of GDP to Eisenhower-era levels, and it [...]

Today, activists from around Wisconsin will travel to Madison to deliver petitions for the recall of Governor Scott Walker, his Lt. Governor Rebecca Kleefisch, and as many as four Republican state Senators. Walker has gone AWOL from the Capitol on this day, scheduled to be in New York, undoubtedly raising money for what will be [...]

The President has a speech at this hour where he will call for the consolidation of several federal agencies to shrink the federal bureaucracy and save money, a return to the “age of austerity” Obama that has faded of late as the election nears and populism returns to the fore. Obama will propose combining the [...]

Among the many saving graces of the Mitt Romney bloodletting over his time at Bain Capital (and don’t give me this crap that Romney is a victim of SuperPACs, his SuperPAC destroyed Gingrich in Iowa, and has spent more money than the SuperPAC of any other candidate) is that we’re having a serious conversation about [...]

It irks me to hear Democratic officials hail “private sector jobs numbers” or the “rebound in the private sector,” as if there are somehow two economies out there, and the amount of jobs up or down in the one where governments happen to sign the paychecks somehow has no bearing on the other. When cops [...]

Look, there are plenty of ways to downplay the December jobs report, if that’s your goal. It’s a modestly good report, but there’s plenty to concern yourself with in the numbers, as Jared Bernstein points out. We’re still well off from getting back to a normal unemployment rate, the quality of jobs being added fall [...]