Emma Curchin

1 month ago | cepr.net | Data Bytes |Dean Baker |Peter Hart |Emma Curchin

When Elon Musk and his DOGE boys were raiding the Social Security Administration (SSA) and coming up with their nutty fantasies about millions of dead people getting Social Security, they apparently didn’t bother to spend any time looking at actual data about the program. If they had, they might have gotten a bit of understanding about not only the program, but also the labor market and immigration.

1 month ago | cepr.net | Data Bytes |Dean Baker |Emma Curchin

Past recessions have been the result of policy errors or disasters. The most typical policy error is when the Federal Reserve Board raises interest rates too much to counter inflation. That was clearly the story in the 1974-75 recession as well as the 1980-82 double-dip recession. Then we have recessions caused by collapsing financial bubbles, the 2001 recession following the collapse of the stock bubble and the 2008-09 recession following the collapse of the housing bubble.

1 month ago | cepr.net | Data Bytes |Dean Baker |Brandon Novick |Emma Curchin

Elon Musk has been having a good time the last month and a half going cracking down on funding for life-saving drugs for people suffering from AIDS and blocking shipments of food to starving kids in Africa. He also thinks he’s really tough because he can fire park rangers getting $40,000 a year. But for some reason, Elon’s chainsaw doesn’t seem to work very well when it might affect the money going to rich people.

2 months ago | cepr.net | Data Bytes |Dean Baker |Mark Weisbrot |Emma Curchin

Good followers of Donald Trump have to believe an increasingly large collection of ridiculous lies. First and foremost, they have to believe that the 2020 election was stolen. Then they have the corollary, that January 6th was an inside job pulled off for some reason by the FBI. Of course, they have to believe global warming isn’t happening and apparently now that that Ukraine started its war with Russia.

2 months ago | cepr.net | Data Bytes |Dean Baker |Emmanuela Omole |Emma Curchin

President Biden handed off the best economy to an incoming president since at least the 2001 handoff from Clinton to Bush II. In his last quarter in office, GDP grew at a 2.3 percent annual rate (final demand, which excludes inventory fluctuations, grew at a 3.2 percent rate). That brought the average growth rate for Biden’s presidency to 3.2 percent, the highest since Clinton’s second term.