The Hill Op-Ed: How to fight poverty and boost work with an enhanced Child Tax Credit
The president’s 2024 budget, released today, calls for reinstating the 2021 expansion of the Child Tax Credit, which dramatically reduced child poverty. The temporary effect of that one-year expansion on poverty rates was a remarkable feat — instead of what surely would have been an increase in child poverty while the economy was still weak, we saw a reduction ...
Financial Times Op-Ed: America’s slowing population growth is here to stay
The US faces a demographic challenge that many other high-income countries have been facing for decades: below replacement level fertility. As American adults are choosing to have fewer children than previous generations did, the nation faces the prospect of slower population growth. Though some celebrate a decline in births as good news for the planet, ...
Washington Post Op-Ed: What a successful economic recovery plan must look like
It was good news that the economy added 2.5 million jobs last month. But we are still only one-tenth of the way to repairing the massive labor market damage caused by the novel coronavirus. The job growth was bolstered by massive governmental intervention, and most of the fiscal policies are coming to an end. In order to protect ...
The Hill Op-Ed: Emerging from the COVID-19 crisis as a better and more resilient society
Our nation is facing a once-in-a-generation challenge in the COVID-19 pandemic and associated economic crisis. These events will define us for decades to come, and we can only hope that we will be defined by the wisdom and courage of our response rather than by the failures that led us to this tragic place. It ...
Washington Post Op-Ed: Americans are being left behind. Here’s how we fix it.
Many Americans are being left behind by today’s modern, global economy, and they are justifiably angry about it. Growing numbers of people feel our economic and political systems are rigged against them. And it’s no wonder why. Recent progress in low- and middle-income wage growth is a blip against decades of wage stagnation. Low unemployment ...
August 2024 Jobs Report: The Summer Slowdown Continues
The BLS estimated that the US economy added 142,000 jobs in August, and the unemployment rate ticked down slightly from 4.3% to 4.2%. This report is far from a worst-case-scenario many had feared, but does tell a consistent story of a labor market that is moving from a phase of post-pandemic normalization into outright weakness. ...
Technological Disruption in the US Labor Market
DAVID DEMING, CHRISTOPHER ONG, LAWRENCE H. SUMMERS This paper explores past episodes of technological disruption in the US labor market, with the goal of learning lessons about the likely future impact of artificial intelligence (AI). The authors measure changes in the structure of the US labor market going back over a century in two ways. ...
The Surprising Resilience of Globalization: An Examination of Claims of Economic Fragmentation
This paper evaluates the current landscape of global trade and financial flows and proposes a set of reforms to support healthier forms of integration. Brad Setser finds that, despite the growing, bipartisan skepticism about the value of liberal trade, global economic integration remains surprisingly resilient. In fact, Setser argues, the immediate risk facing the global ...
TIME Magazine: High Debt Threatens the U.S. Economy
The difficulty U.S. Congress has had agreeing on spending for this year and avoiding a government shutdown is an indication of just how hard it will be to deal with our longer term debt crisis. Our rising debt burden is a problem we must confront in order to preserve our nation’s ability to address the ...