The Feed

Co-Director of Social Security Works, Nancy Altman’s statement at the Hearing on the Presidents and other bipartisan entitlement reform proposals at the  House Way and Means Committee. Abstract:For the reasons explained in this statement, the chained CPI is a poorly targeted benefit cut. The overwhelming majority of Americans oppose all benefit cuts – as they should. Social ...

The Senate’s failure to respond meaningfully to the Newtown massacre was deplorable, but the real tragedy is that it was utterly predictable. In our “show me the money” political system, special interests and their armies of lobbyists call the tunes. Congress will continue ignoring the issues that matter most to Americans until we fundamentally change the ...

The Clearing House, an association of banks, is at the forefront of efforts to prevent further potential restrictions on how large financial firms operate. One piece of the Clearing House-led pushback is a report recently commissioned from Oxford Economics, which purports to show that higher capital requirements would depress economic growth. (The report appeared on the Clearing House ...

Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff came as close to celebrity status as an economist can ever come, with their book, This Time Is Different. They claimed that 800 years (!) of financial history proves that high government debt ratios lead to low economic growth. Governments all over the world took heed and downsized, adopting austerity that cost ...

Recent work by my colleagues at UMass Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash and Robert Pollin (2013)—hereafter HAP—has demonstrated that in contrast to the apparent results in Reinhart and Rogoff (2010), there is no real discontinuity or “tipping point” around 90 percent of debt-to-GDP ratio. In their response, Reinhart and Rogoff—hereafter RR—admit to the arithmetic mistakes, but argue that ...

Professor James Galbraith  criticizes the mainstream analysis of inequality and looks at  different measures and ways of analyzing income data. Listen at Econ Talk.

Last Thursday House Republicans introduced the misleadingly titled “Working Families Flexibility Act of 2013.” Touted by Republicans as a new comp time initiative that will give hourly-paid workers the flexibility to meet family responsibilities, it is neither new nor about giving these workers much needed time off to care for their families. The bill rehashes ...

Herndon, Ash and Pollin replicate Reinhart and Rogoff and find that coding errors, selective exclusion of available data, and unconventional weighting of summary statistics lead to serious errors that inaccurately represent the relationship between public debt and GDP growth among 20 advanced economies in the post-war period. They find that when properly calculated, the average ...

New York City has become safer over the last decade. Yet relations between the police and minority communities have become ever more strained. Much of the tension stems from the N.Y.P.D.’s stop and frisk policy, which disproportionately targets black and Latino men. Muslim communities are troubled by the NYPD’s intelligence operation, which collects information about their daily ...

This paper argues the euro zone crisis is the product of a toxic neoliberal economic policy cocktail.The mixing of that cocktail traces all the way back to the early 1980s when Europe embraced the neoliberal economic model that undermined the income and demand generation process via wage stagnation and widened income inequality. Stagnation was serially postponed by ...