LeeCoppock.com
Econ News You Can Use
Category: Fiscal Policy
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
The unemployment rate in Greece rose to 27.9% in June. It is worst among young adults: Data showed those aged 15 to 24 remained the hardest-hit as the jobless rate in this age group, excluding students and military conscripts, registered 58.8 percent. The Greek economy is in its sixth year of recession. That's going to…
-
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:…
-
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…
LeeCoppock.com 