Video: Pawlenty reacts to Obama’s reelection announcement

The same morning President Barack Obama announced he’s running for re-election, Minnesota’s Tim Pawlenty countered with a video rebuttal. Like his previous Hollywood-style offerings, this one combines a cinematic soundtrack with quick-cut editing. This time it’s a compilation of doom-and-gloom footage — complete with a clip of lightning ominously More…

Debating the Virtues of a Divided Government

Lots of individual seats in Tuesday’s House and Senate races remain genuine toss-ups, but the consensus among odds-makers about the House is pretty darn clear. Stu Rothenberg wrote in his latest report, “Democrats seem likely to lose at least 50 seats, but the GOP’s ceiling for gains is much More…

Structural v. Cyclical, Again

The question of whether the United States’ unemployment is structural (due to some industries getting bigger and others shrinking, not ameliorated much by stimulus spending or looser monetary policy) or cyclical (due to an economy-wide lack of demand, ameliorated by stimulus spending and looser monetary policy) continues to rage — More…

Federal Reserve Meets, Unlikely to Change Policy Course

This morning, members of the Federal Open Market Committee are meeting to discuss the country’s monetary policy. They are expected to release a report at 2:15 p.m. reiterating the troubles in the economy and stating the Federal Reserve will keep interest rates near zero for an “extended period.” But with More…

Are Unemployment Benefits Actually Increasing the Unemployment Rate?

I wanted to pull out part of my article from this morning, as it makes a somewhat confusing but nevertheless important point. Most policy experts and economists think that unemployment insurance discourages people from looking for work or accepting jobs offered to them, keeping them unemployed for longer — More…

Is Effective Deficit Reduction Possible Without a ‘Catastrophic Crisis’?

Michael Kinsley, managing editor of The Atlantic Wire, is annoyed with Paul Krugman’s latest column in The New York Times, which he calls “patronizing” for its language and seeming blindness to political reality:

Paul Krugman writes another patronizing column Monday morning in the New York Times, accusing deficit

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Krugman on the Community Reinvestment Act

I meant to blog this when it first came out, but Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times writer Paul Krugman has as good an evisceration of the right-wing talking point that the Community Reinvestment Act caused the subprime bubble as I’ve seen. I’ll leave it to him:

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In Oil and Coal Disasters, Parallel Tales of Lax Regulation

On the surface, the two accidents couldn’t have been more different. The first occurred in the rugged mountains of Appalachia; the second was more than a thousand miles away in the Gulf of Mexico. One was miles underground; the other thousands of feet underwater. One happened in pursuit of coal; More…

Consumption Outpaces Income Growth

This morning, the Commerce Department released its latest set of data on income and consumption. The good news? They are both growing — Americans are earning more, and spending more. The bad news? Consumption is growing faster than income, and Americans are saving less to fuel their purchases.

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Sanders: Tea Partiers Work to Dems’ Advantage

For Republicans in Washington trying to latch onto the small-government momentum of the Tea Party movement, there’s this little glitch: Their very jobs depend on the same big spending in Washington that the Tea Partiers claim to oppose.

Recall, for example, the GOP outcry when the More…