That’s a clunky title for this post, but I couldn’t think of any other way of expressing the potential political impact of a very muddled employment situation. Let’s start with the obvious. The White House is very happy about the recent numbers showing that the unemployment rate has dropped to 7.8 percent. And since I […]

There have been lots of studies showing that there’s no benefit to job training programs. People who sign up with these government schemes are not more likely to either get jobs or to earn more money. Heck, even the New York Times was forced to acknowledge that these programs are a costly failure. To really […]

I’ve done a few comparisons of economic performance under Reagan and Obama, sometimes using the interactive data from the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank. And I’ve done a few TV interviews on the same subject. But something was very different in this interview on the Fox morning show. I was asked to respond to the Obama […]

I almost feel sorry for the ideologues and partisan hacks who feel obliged to defends Obama’s miserable economic performance. Keynesian spending policies and class-warfare tax policies have produced dismal economic performance, with unemployment stuck above 8 percent – even though the White House promised the joblessness rate by this point would be about 5.5 percent […]

The new unemployment numbers have been released and the White House must be somewhat happy. The joblessness rate is down to 8.2 percent, which means the number that gets the most publicity continues to move in the right direction. I’ve been predicting that Obama will win reelection if the unemployment rate falls to 8.0 percent […]

I’ve written periodically about the perverse incentives of the unemployment insurance system. Simply stated, there will be fewer jobs if the government subsidizes joblessness, and I even showed that this is a consensus position by citing the academic writings of left-leaning economists such as Larry Summers and Paul Krugman. The San Francisco Federal Reserve also […]