Lots of people were angered by Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s announcement that he would use money gained from the foreclosure fraud settlement to plug his budget hole. I suspected that a lot of states with a budget gap would go this route. And that apparently includes Missouri, a state with a Democratic Governor and a [...]

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 [...]

The gross domestic product increased by 2.8% in the last quarter of 2011 boosted by sales of cars but hampered by austerity in government purchases over the final three months. The full year growth was only 1.7%, which as a release from the Economic Policy Institute says,”would not generate reliable declines in unemployment should it [...]

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 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 [...]

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 [...]

California’s ambitious high speed rail program hit a snag yesterday when a peer review group recommended a halt to continued bond funding of the project until a long-term funding source can be secured. Let’s back up a bit. In 2008, California voters passed a proposition enabling bond financing of a high speed rail network stretching [...]

If you look at the economic statistics, what should cause the most worry for policymakers is the troubling bifurcation between private sector and public sector jobs. The private sector hasn’t created jobs at a spectacular or even a good pace, but they’ve seen modest, sustained growth for 20 straight months. By contrast, the public sector [...]

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the economy added 80,000 jobs in October, and the topline unemployment rate ticked down a notch to 9.0%. This is the seventh straight month that the unemployment rate has been between 9.0 and 9.2%, a period of stasis for the economy, a low-growth holding pattern. The private sector [...]

The Obama Administration approved cuts to California’s Medicaid program that will slash reimbursement rates and potentially cause providers to reject treatment for the program for the poor. The federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) will allow the state to cut reimbursement rates by 10 percent this fiscal year for a variety of Medi-Cal [...]

The Obama Administration and the Senate are proceeding on a piece-by-piece strategy with the American Jobs Act, which failed a cloture vote on the motion to proceed last week. First up is a $35 billion bill to help states with fiscal imbalances: President Obama is returning to the road this week to press Congress to [...]