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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…

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…

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…

September 27, 2023

The Good and Bad News About Boys and Men in Utah

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

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),…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…