Scribbling, scribbling, scribbling on the Internet.
To wit: After adding 217,000 net new jobs last month, the U.S. economy has recovered all the positions lost during the Great Recession. But economists warned that the news Friday from the Labor Department was no real reason to celebrate. “Things are improving, but it’s happening agonizingly slowly,” said Heidi Shierholz, a labor market economist …
Continue reading "Just a Reminder: The Labor Market Is Still Unhealthy"
I know that it is now considered déclassé to say anything negative about Obamacare; we are merely to assume that it has succeeded beyond anyone's wildest dreams and that anybody who suggests otherwise is either stupid or lying or both. But when I read stories like this one, I can't help but think that believing in …
Here is the story. And here is the part where I ask (again) why it is that so many protectionists are willing to try to sabotage Uber and UberX, and by extension, sabotage the lives of those who depend on Uber and UberX to put food on the table and a roof over their heads …
I don't quite understand how this story can seem to be so sanguine about the employment situation; 192,000 jobs created is simply not enough to keep up with population growth, let alone being enough to turn around an employment market that has been weak since the onset of the recession in 2007. We should be creating …
Just unbelievable: It’s been a bad week for Obamacare. Incredibly, the White House has had to grant yet another delay in the employer mandate. This time, employers with between 50 to 99 employees who don’t already offer health insurance to their employees have until 2016 to comply with the shifting Obamacare requirements. This latest delay represents …
Continue reading "Unbelievably Enough, We Have News of Still More Obamacare Problems"
At this rate, it will take us forever to achieve full employment: The American economy added 113,000 jobs in January, a disappointing showing that is likely to spur fears that the labor market is poised for yet another slowdown. Before the report from the Labor Department on Friday morning, economists had been looking for the …
Continue reading "The Employment Market Continues to Be Weak"
Last night's State of the Union address was replete with platitudes, buzzwords, lame rhetorical tricks, and the same old same old. There was nothing, new, path-breaking or consequential that came out of it. Given former White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs's admission that President Obama "stopped trying to change Washington years ago," I suppose that none of …
Continue reading "The State of Speechmaking about the State of the Union"
Michael Strain has drawn up an employment policy agenda for conservatives (and for right-of-center libertarians too, for that matter), that is must-reading. It serves as a valuable contribution to the debate over employment policy and hopefully will shake up that debate significantly and lead to pathbreaking reforms and legislation that might help get more people back …
Just when I thought that we might be out of the woods: In a blow to hopes that the economy was finally gaining momentum, the government reported on Friday that employers added jobs last month at the slowest pace in three years, although some experts cautioned that wintry weather in many parts of the country …
We finally seem to have some good employment news: By the slow-moving standards of the current recovery, the national employment report released Friday was decidedly upbeat. The U.S. unemployment rate fell to a five-year low of 7.0% in November from 7.3% in October, and the pace of hiring in the U.S. was stronger than expected, …
Continue reading "A Data Point in Favor of the Existence of a Merciful Deity"
Pejman Yousefzadeh 