April 9, 2024
The Child Tax Credit: My Long-Read Q&A with Kevin Corinth
The Child Tax Credit is a tax benefit available to many American families for the purpose of reducing their federal income tax liability. It’s specifically designed to help offset the cost of raising children. The CTC of today, however, differs starkly from its pre-pandemic structure. Many economists, including Kevin Corinth, think that the post-pandemic changes were a step…
April 9, 2024
Biden Knows Student Loan Cancellation Is a Bad Idea
This morning, President Biden announced new details about the latest effort to cancel student debt that he says will reduce balances or completely cancel student debt for over 30 million Americans. First, he plans to cancel up to $20,000 of accumulated unpaid interest, regardless of the borrowers’ income. Second, the administration plans to automatically cancel debt for…
April 5, 2024
What’s Wrong with the US Economy? Anything?
Economists were expecting 200,000 net new jobs added in March. Instead it was 50 percent more. Unexpected strength, but maybe not so unexpected, really, for an economy that continues to deliver surprise after surprise. It’s been a great run lately for economic optimists: real wage gains, faster labor productivity, and gobs of jobs. A tight summary…
March 28, 2024
Federal Student Lending is Beyond Repair
The integrity of the federal student loan program has been in precipitous decline since early 2020, when then-President Trump responded to the Covid-19 pandemic by putting a pause on student loan repayment. In retrospect, that move was the first domino to fall in a string of policy changes, culminating in the implementation of President Biden’s…
February 12, 2024
Millennials Are Doing Better than You Probably Think
“Each generation is worse off than the one before.” It’s one of the primary tenets of the notion that American capitalism has failed and that we live in the final days of “late capitalism.” But have things really been all downhill since the Boomers became adults? Maybe not, according to the new study “Has Intergenerational…
January 9, 2024
Post-Pandemic Recovery for America’s Prime Age Labor Force: A Tale of Two Sexes
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) “monthly jobs report” last Friday closed the book on 2023, recording a continuing expansion of both labor supply and paid work in America last year—and continuation of the lowest annual unemployment rate since the 1960s. America not only missed the 2023 recession that many (including your humble servant) were…
December 8, 2023
Room for Compromise on the Hot Foods Act
Last month, members of the House of Representatives and Senate sent a letter encouraging Farm Bill negotiators to consider the Hot Foods Act. The legislation would allow recipients of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly food stamps) to use their benefits on hot prepared meals sold at grocery stores. Currently, the program restricts hot foods from purchase…
November 30, 2023
A Valuable New Perspective on America’s War on Poverty
I suppose if you’re someone who thinks American capitalism has failed and unironically uses the phrase “late capitalism,” there’s probably no changing your mind. So I guess this post is meant for folks who have concerns about the American economy yet also have an open mind about new information. For this group, I have a…
October 27, 2023
Food Insecurity in the US and Inflation
The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has released its annual report on household food security—a survey that measures whether US households have “access at all times to enough food for an active, healthy lifestyle.” The report documented the largest yearly increase in food insecurity since the Great Recession—increasing from 10.2 to 12.8 percent of all US households…
October 11, 2023
CHANGING THE OFFICIAL POVERTY MEASURE WOULD HELP RICH STATES AND HURT POOR STATES
Earlier this year, a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report recommended elevating the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) to the “nation’s headline poverty statistic,” and noted that the Office of Management and Budget could christen the SPM as the new official poverty measure. This action would require no Congressional input. The two interactive maps below report…