US economic policies
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What this transition meant, however, is that jobs and livelihoods on the farm were being destroyed. Because of accelerating productivity, output was increasing faster than demand, and prices fell sharply. It was this, more than anything else, that led to rapidly declining incomes. Farmers then (like workers now) borrowed heavily to sustain living standards and production. Because neither the farmers nor their bankers anticipated the steepness of the price declines, a credit crunch quickly ensued. Farmers simply couldn’t pay back what they owed.
[2012] Joseph Stiglitz: “A Banking System is Supposed to Serve Society, Not the Other Way Around” | Politics | Vanity Fair
Raghavan Mayur, president at TechnoMetrica Market Intelligence, follows unemployment data closely. So, when his survey for May revealed that 28% of the 1,000-odd households surveyed reported that at least one member was looking for a full-time job, he was flummoxed. "Our numbers are always very accurate, so I was surprised at the discrepancy with the government's numbers," says Mayur, whose firm owns the TIPP polling unit, a polling partner for Investors' Business Daily and Christian Science Monitor .
[july 2010] The Real Unemployment Rate: Is It 9.5%, 16.5%, 22%, or Higher? - DailyFinance
Economic Crisis Forces Local Governments to Let Asphalt Roads Return to Gravel - WSJ.com
Dan Koeck for The Wall Street Journal A road crew in Jamestown, N.D., where road repair means reclaiming the original asphalt and processing it to resemble gravel. SPIRITWOOD, N.D.—A hulking yellow machine inched along Old Highway 10 here recently in a summer scene that seemed as normal as the nearby corn swaying in the breeze.
Despite comparable pre-award performance, the two groups diverge in the years that follow. HHMI winners are almost twice as likely to produce studies that are highly cited by other researchers. They are also more likely to produce research that introduces new words and phrases into their fields of research, as measured by the list of "keywords" they attach to their studies to describe their work. The downside is that they also produce more stinkers—studies that never get cited by anyone.
How to make America more innovative: give scientists more incent
Afghanistan and America’s troubled backyard | Analysis & Opinion |
The United States is spending around $6.5 billion a month on the war in faraway Afghanistan, where a large part of its effort is meant to help the government assert its authority, fight corruption and set up functioning institutions. Closer to home, the U.S. has allotted $44 million a month to help the governments of its closest neighbours – Mexico and Central America – assert their authority, fight corruption and set up functioning institutions. The two cases raise questions about American priorities. If money were the only gauge, one might draw the conclusion that it is 147 times more important for Washington to bring security and good governance to Afghanistan than to America’s violence-plagued next-door neighbours — Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. In the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez alone, 6,000 people have died in the past two and a half years, a number that dwarfs the military death toll of Afghanistan since the war there began in 2001.
Click above to access visual and for the Full Report entitled Estimating U.S. Government Subsidies to Energy Sources: 2002-2008 click here! [HT: Barry Ritholtz @ The Big Picture]
Estimating U.S. Government Subsidies to Energy Sources (02-08) [From Environmental Law Institute] | Computational Legal Studies™
[2010] How Much Do UI Extensions Matter for Unemployment? - The Agenda - National Review Online
James Pethokoukis of Reuters flags a blog post at the Atlanta Fed, highlighting Fed research on how UI benefit extensions have affected the unemployment rate. Two Fed studies suggest that they may have contributed 0.4 to 1.7 percentage points to current unemployment. But a closer look at this research makes me skeptical that the effects have been so large. The first study , from the San Francisco Fed, looks at average duration of employment for unemployed people eligible for UI benefits, compared to those who are ineligible because they left jobs willingly or are new workforce entrants. Obviously, for both groups, average unemployment duration is up sharply in the recession, but for the UI-eligible it has grown by an additional 1.6 weeks.
[August 2010] Une histoire qui s’achève, par François Leclerc
Sur proposition de l’administration Obama, le Sénat vient d’accorder in extremis 26,1 milliards de dollars d’aide budgétaire aux Etats américains – dont nombre d’entre eux sont au bord de la faillite – en attendant que les membres de la Chambre des représentants interrompent d’urgence leurs vacances pour entériner cette décision. Il s’agit d’assurer la rentrée scolaire prochaine en donnant aux Etats les moyens de payer 100.000 enseignants, de financer Medicaid (l’aide médicale aux défavorisés) et de sauver les emplois des pompiers et des policiers. Afin de trouver une majorité, il a fallu déshabiller Paul pour habiller Jacques et couper sur les crédits du programme de bonds alimentaires à partir de 2014.In January, Timothy Geithner, the treasury secretary, received an invitation to testify before the House government oversight committee. It was a moment the administration had been dreading for months. Now that the GOP controls the House of Representatives, it has enormous investigative power, which flows through the oversight committee and its ambitious chairman, Darrell Issa. And, in the run-up to the November election, Issa hadn’t been shy about his intention to use it. Such was the anxiety on Pennsylvania Avenue that the White House had quietly assembled a team of lawyers and communications staffers to deal with Issa’s requests. Geithner was inclined to reject the invitation, a move fraught with risk.
[2011] Geithner, Summers, Obama, And The U.S. Economy: How The Treasury Secretary Got His Groove Back | The New Republic
The Fed
[2010] Finance reform & Volcker rule
A unsustainable Defense budget level
Miniature by Tom Magliery : http://www.flickr.com/photos/mag3737/307017836/ by moktarama Sep 9