The Heritage Foundation’s Fuzzy Math

Here’s a blog post of mine just published over on Concord’s blog, The Tabulation; I’m cross-posting it here:

With long-term unemployment surging to unprecedented highs, Annie Lowrey takes a look at the plight of those facing expiration of Unemployment Insurance as they head up against the 99 week mark:

As noted below, it is a slow day, but this is well worth reading (there's quite a bit more in the original post):

The BLS Glossary defines full-time workers as "Persons who work 35 hours or more per week". For monthly reporting, the BLS defines part-time as "those who worked 1 to 34 hours during the survey reference week". With that wording, I am not precisely sure where 34.1 or 34.5 hours fit.

The first problem with the distinction Republicans are making between the need to offset the cost of extended unemployment benefits (they say “yes”) versus the need to offset the cost of tax cuts for the rich (they say “no”) is that they are mixing up the short-term fiscal policy goal of stimulating aggregate demand with the longer-term fiscal policy goal of en

By Simon Johnson Some House and Senate Republicans have worked hard to ensure that a “balanced budget” constitutional amendment be included in the mix of policies under consideration to address longer-run fiscal issues in the United States.  Such an amendment is presented as way to keep spending and deficits under control, by requiring that federal spending not exceed revenues. But there are three main problems with this potential approach as it is currently articulated.

Following up on yesterday's post on the Heritage Foundation's assessment of the Ryan plan, I thought it would be useful to see how the labor and capital supply elasticities that are implied in the simulations compare with the literature, for the benefit of my macroeconomics class.

Activists in Wisconsin have hit upon a method that coud conceivably lead to the end of the deadlock there. Several Republican State Senators are eligible for recall, and progressives in the state are going to go for it: