Should "Fairfax County" become a city?

Today, the U.S. Census Bureau released their report on Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States in 2011. As we continue to fight back from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the Income, Poverty and Health Insurance Coverage report released today provides further evidence of how critical it is that we implement policies that benefit and create security for struggling families and our middle class—and not just the wealthiest Americans.  Today’s report shows that while too many American families are still struggling, the nation’s poverty rate fell and the percentage of Americans with health insurance coverage rose in 2011. It is clear that had President Obama not taken swift and aggressive action to grow our economy and create jobs, today’s report would have shown much higher poverty rates, lower incomes, and a greater share of the population without health insurance.  Though our poverty rate remains unacceptably high, this report shows that the poverty rate ticked down in 2011 after rising for several years in the wake of the Great Recession. Poverty fell for all age groups, including children, elderly, and non-elderly adults. A key reason for this decline was that 2.2 million more people had full-time jobs last year, in part because unemployment fell by 0.9 percentage points from December 2010 to December 2011. Government programs also continued to provide a vital safety net. 

Submitted by Charles Hugh Smith from Of Two Minds The Erosion Of The U.S. Economy In Two Words: Jobs And Wages The current de facto policy of inflating asset bubbles to spark a "wealth effect" is no substitute for policies that make it less burdensome to start new enterprises and hire employees.

(cc photo by dave_mcmt)

Joseph Delaney thinks that playing host to a prestigious university is no ticket to prosperity:

Kevin Drum writes a bit of a prelude to the latest Los Angeles public school controversy:

There are a lot of studies looking at the economic impacts of immigration, but what about the economic impacts of restricting immigration? Over the past few years, a lot of cities and counties have enacted restrictive laws, which creates a nice natural experiment of sorts: As an area becomes less friendly to immigrants, what happens to its economy?

By Matthew Yglesias This Foreign Policy article on Steig Larsson and the decline of the Swedish utopia concludes with what seems to me to be a whopper of a factual error: