LeeCoppock.com
Econ News You Can Use
Category: Federal Budget
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Should we ditch macroeconomics or perhaps reduce it to two weeks? In a recent blog post, Noah Smith argues that most of the material in a Principles of Macroeconomics class isn’t really necessary. After teaching macro principles to more than 1,000 students per year since 2003, it is easy for me to find the blind…
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In September, Eurostat waved a magic wand and increased the GDP in the European Union by 3.53 percent overnight. That is a full year's worth of very solid growth. But it didn't make Europeans any wealthier because it was actually just due to a new definition of the way GDP is counted. Eurostat (the economic…
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I've blogged about this before (see here), but the labor force participation rate (LFPR) just keeps falling. Nobody sees this as positive news – more and more U.S. workers are sitting on the sidelines. The latest jobs report brought the good news of a falling unemployment rate, but part of this is because workers are…
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Japan is simultaneously implementing both expansionary and contractionary fiscal policy. According to The Wall Street Journal, the massive government debt has necessitated an increase in the national sales tax: Prime Minister Shinzo Abe took a long-awaited decision to raise Japan's sales tax by 3 percentage points (LC: up to 8% total), placing the need to…
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Today, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) revised upward its estimates for future U.S. federal debt levels. As the graph below shows, the CBO projects the federal debt held by the public to reach 100% of GDP in 2038. How bad is this news? Just last year, the CBO predicted that this debt measure would actually…
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The New York Times reports that U.S. birth rates were flat in 2012, ending a decline that began in 2007. The falling birth rate seems to be linked to economic conditions: In 2011, the Pew Research Center analyzed the fall in fertility by geography and found a strong link between falling fertility and economic malaise:…
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Kevin Drum at Mother Jones reports on the public perception regarding the deficit and points to a google poll to illustrate his point. The chart below shows the current results. Why do most people believe the deficit is increasing when we know it has been shrinking since 2011? Kevin suggests that this is because people are too slow…
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