But Clinton was persuaded finally in 1996 to raise it in stages to $5.15, in part by Card and Krueger’s paper. Krueger himself was by then working in Clinton’s administration as chief economist at the Labor Department. (Krueger would later be assistant treasury secretary for economic policy and chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers […]
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Growing partisan rancor over the debt limit culminated in 2011, when a prolonged struggle by the Obama administration to get Congress to approve an increase prompted Standard & Poor’s to downgrade its credit rating on U.S. treasury bills. No credit agency had ever done this before, and none has done so since (though S&P has recently threatened that […]
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Tamara Ware is used to getting calls offering financial advice from her community specialist, a social worker of sorts at Springboard to Opportunities, a nonprofit that provides support to the residents of the affordable housing complex where she lives in Jackson, Mississippi, with her three daughters. But one day in February 2020 she got a […]
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If Janklow would abolish South Dakota’s interest-rate ceiling, Citibank promised, Citibank would create 400 jobs in his state. In 1981, Janklow delivered. “Thanks to Janklow,” Oliver Bullough wrote in The Guardian in 2019, “South Dakota has a financial services industry, and the US has a trillion-dollar credit card debt.” Delaware and Nevada followed South Dakota’s lead, creating a financial-services boom in […]
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“I would probably favor having the college benefit and the community college piece means-tested. But some point out that, overwhelmingly, people going to community college are going to meet the means test, so there is some degree to which if you put up a paperwork, means-testing requirement on something that is already largely for low- […]
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Now that the pandemic relief jobless benefits have expired for millions of Americans and the eviction moratorium was ended by the Supreme Court, we are finally beginning to return to a normal economy. That is to say, one featuring hunger, homelessness, and an increasingly larger dose of gambling. At the beginning of the year, we […]
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If Wyden finds a way to rebate the carbon tax’s effect on the entire 98.2 percent of the public on whom Biden promised not to raise taxes, it will hardly be worth imposing the tax at all. Consequently, there’s a decent likelihood Wyden will exempt oil companies from any carbon tax the Senate Finance Committee […]
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The Democratic policy proposals are all, every single one, investments. Universal pre-kindergarten is an investment in children, mostly poor, who don’t have access to that now, and a jillion studies show it pays off. Paid family leave is an investment in families’ mental well-being. A national network of childcare facilities is an investment that will […]
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Harvard economist Greg Mankiw, who was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush, says Joe Biden’s $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill threatens economic prosperity. Mankiw doesn’t doubt whether, “from a narrow budgetary standpoint,” the United States can afford to spend $3.5 trillion. Unlike the reconciliation bill’s Republican opponents in Congress, he […]
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The Washington Post’s Paul Kane came about as close to calling them hypocrites and liars as I’ve ever seen a straight news reporter come. Savor these two sentences, which follow the rules of objective news writing but still manage to lay bare a naked truth in a way most news writing does not: “Because Democrats […]
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