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December 11, 2023
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…
October 5, 2023
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…
October 5, 2023
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…
September 27, 2023
Utah is doing exceptionally well on most metrics. The state is booming population-wise, with an almost 7 percent increase in population since 2018. Unemployment remains below the national average and the Beehive State’s economy…
September 15, 2023
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),…
September 6, 2023
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…
August 3, 2023
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…
March 6, 2023
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…
February 23, 2023
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…
February 13, 2023
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…