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December 11, 2023
Has Inequality Made Americans Poorer than Bulgarians, Russians, and Filipinos?
A recent column by John Burn-Murdoch in the Financial Times presents statistics side-by-side showing that “the wealthiest Americans are the richest people in the developed world, but America’s poorest are also the most likely to go hungry.” The chart buttressing the latter part of that conclusion shows that in over 12 percent of American households,…
October 5, 2023
Do 60 Percent Of American Workers Have Insecure Jobs?
American Compass has a new survey out in which it finds, among other results, that “only 40 percent of workers have secure jobs.” This is the latest attempt by the outfit to portray the American economy as in dire need of “rebuilding.” The report summarizing the findings is titled, “Labor Market Not Yet Working for…
October 5, 2023
Changing the Official Poverty Measure Would Help Rich States and Hurt Poor States
In this post I discuss the policy implications of declaring the Supplemental Poverty Measure the new official measure, an action that could be taken unilaterally by the Director of the Office of Management and Budget without any input from Congress. First, I report how eligibility for major means-tested programs would substantially rise in higher income…
September 27, 2023
The Good and Bad News About Boys and Men in Utah
For all that Utah is doing well, a concerning trend has surfaced amongst boys and men in the state.
September 15, 2023
Putting This Year’s Poverty Numbers in Context
On Tuesday, the Census Bureau released its latest income and poverty estimates covering calendar year 2022, including two assessments of poverty in America. One, called the Official Poverty Measure (OPM), focuses on earnings and cash-like government benefits, such as Social Security, unemployment, and welfare checks. A second, known as the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), also…
September 6, 2023
Working from Home Has Increased More Modestly Than Many Believe
The shock of the COVID-19 pandemic created urgent demand for “high frequency” national statistics. Prior to the pandemic, many economic indicators were available only on an annual basis (or even less frequently). One important exception was the unemployment rate, which the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates every month. The unemployment rate jumped more than threefold—from…
August 3, 2023
Another Pandemic Legacy: Removing the EITC’s Work and Earnings Requirement
Since its origin in the 1970s, the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) has been the premier federal program promoting and rewarding work by low-income adults. As displayed below, taxpayers have devoted rapidly growing resources to the EITC since the 1980s. Overall, between 1975 and 2022, the EITC cost taxpayers a total of $1.8 trillion, which…
March 6, 2023
The Federal AI Shambles
The future is fast arriving—as the last year’s developments in artificial intelligence make clear—but the national government is nowhere near ready. Over the last year, we’ve seen the explosion into the public consciousness of major breakthroughs in artificial intelligence in the form of new tools that were immediately widely available. First came the release of…
February 23, 2023
Heeding the Warning from the Future
It’s fun to laugh at flat earth theory and similar conspiracist nonsense. It’s less fun to consider the implications of the movement’s resurgence. In case you weren’t aware, America is in the midst of a dramatic, internet-driven resurgence of the fanatical belief that our beautiful, oblate spheroid is in reality a flat plane whose edges…
February 13, 2023
The Eerie Familiarity of California’s Boom-Bust Cycle
Those trying to ride a corporate unicorn to a major IPO should consider the lessons of their nineteenth-century forebears. On January 24, 1848, James Wilson Marshall, a carpenter from New Jersey who had taken up residence near Sutter’s Fort in northeast California, was attempting to establish a timber mill to feed burgeoning construction in nearby…