College Grads Living With Parents - 2/28/13

The unemployed college graduate moving back in with his parents has been a stock figure of the past few years, helping to cement the Millennials' reputation as the "Boomerang Generation." But how many young grads are returning to live with their mom and dad (or their aunt or uncle)?

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How States Rely on Corporate Taxes - 2/28/13

The map shows to what degree each state relies on a corporate income tax to generate state revenues.

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Who's Paying Off Debt - 2/26/13

After running up record debt-to-income ratios during the bubble economy of the 2000s, young adults shed substantially more debt than older adults did during the Great Recession and its immediate aftermath.

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Pro-American at Box Office - 2/26/13

Zero Dark Thirty! and the Hurt Locker were made by same production team, including the director and screenwriter. Although they feature different actors, the overall quality of acting iis also consistent, as measured by Academy Award nominations for the lead characters in each film. Where they differ is in their political bias in how they present their stories, in which the post 9/11 U.S. war against terror is the backdrop.... More

Texas Windfall - 2/25/13

An unexpected surplus poses a challenge to austerity.

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Fed Spending and Sequester - 2/25/13

To listen to President Obama, and even many Republicans, the budget cuts set to go into effect later this week will devastate a wide swath of America.

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Cheaper, More Reliable Than Ever - 2/22/13

The 2013 U.S. Vehicle Dependability Study that was released last week by J.D. Powers and Associates reported that vehicle dependability reached an all-time record high this year. At the same time, the cost of a vehicle has declined in real terms by 64 percent.

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Awful Market for Young Scientists - 2/22/13

Politicians and businessmen are fond of talking about America's scientist shortage -- the dearth of engineering and lab talent that will inevitably leave us sputtering in the global economy. But perhaps it's time they start talking about our scientist surplus instead. 

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Still Unproductive - 2/21/13

The growth in labor productivity around the world remains sluggish.

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Higher Taxes for Better Growth? - 2/21/13

The chart from Congressional Budget Office data shows the steady increase in progressivity over the last three decades, such that 94 percent of the federal tax burden is now paid by the top 20 percent of households.  This is likely a contributing factor in the slowdown in economic growth over the same period.

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Medicare Lowers The Boom - 2/19/13

Obamacare cut Medicare by $716 billion in order to partially fund $1.9 trillion in new entitlement spending over the next ten years. A big chunk of those Medicare cuts came from the market-oriented Medicare Advantage program. On Friday, the administration announced that it would be significantly reducing funding for the popular program.

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Wrestling With Tax Code - 2/19/13

It now takes 73,954 regular 8-1/2" x 11"... More

Sugar Protectionism A Bitter Pill - 2/18/13

Due to import quotas that strictly limit the amount of imported sugar coming into the US at the world price, domestic producers are protected from more efficient foreign sugar growers who can produce cane sugar in Central America, Africa and the Caribbean at roughly half the cost of beet sugar produced in Minnesota and Michigan.

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Obamacare and the Federal Budget - 2/18/13

Throughout 2009 and early 2010, supporters of the then-pending Affordable Care Act (ACA) argued that health-care reform was necessary to repair the federal government’s untenable fiscal outlook. More than any other factor, it was said, health-care cost inflation was the driving force behind massive projected federal deficits, and comprehensive reforms were required to cure the problem. Unfortunately, when enacted, the ACA... More

Fertility Will Rebound - 2/15/13

The recent rise in the fertility rate in developed countries is the beginning of a broad-based increase in fertility towards above-replacement levels. In the longer term, this implies that the proportion of elderly in the population will be lower than projected, reducing the fiscal burden of ageing on developed world governments.

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3 Charts for SOTU - 2/15/13

The trend that emerges is that Republican administrations tend to increase spending, while Democratic ones institutionalize those higher levels of spending.

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Minimum Wage and Poverty - 2/14/13

The fierce political debate over raising the minimum wage, which is repeated yearly in legislatures across the country, has at times been matched by a strong academic debate on the subject. A summary of the last two decades of literature on the minimum wage, co-authored by the lead economist on this study, concluded that most of the evidence points to job loss following wage hikes.

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Income Taxes in the States - 2/14/13

As states like Louisiana contemplate ending their income tax, it's worth noting how the income tax fits into tax revenues at the state and locala level.

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U.S. Creates Swiftest Millionaires - 2/12/13

How long would it take for an average person to earn that special sum? To find out The Economist looked at how much the main breadwinner in an average household makes each year (before tax). On this measure, America creates the swiftest millionaires...

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Earned Income Ironies - 2/12/13

The earned income tax credit credit was created years ago to reduce tax burdens on the poor and to provide an incentive for working. A household must have some wage and salary income in order to receive the credit. However, because the credit is administered on a calendar-year basis and is phased out with calendar-year wages and salaries, it is disproportionately received by people unemployed after a layoff.

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Tx. Attack Provokes Brown - 2/11/13

Much of the talk in California recently was over an ad campaign Texas is running trying to lure jobs from California. Although Gov. Jerry Brown characterized the small campaign by a Texas group as, "a burp; it's barely a fart," it gained plenty of resonance as local papers wrote about it. And now the governor of Texas, Rick Perry, is following up with a visit to the Golden Stat.

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The Sun Will Come Out? - 2/11/13

According to the Congressional Budget Office, economic recovery is always just two years away.

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Healthcare: Budget Monster - 2/08/13

As a percentage of GDP, federal healthcare spending will increase from just under five percent now, to over six percent come 2023.

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FHA Myths - 2/08/13

The National Association of Realtors (NAR) is at it again. Not being satisfied with the FHA’s decades-long lending nightmare that resulted in an estimated 3.2 million dashed homeowner dreams since 1975, it is launching a new ad campaign entitled “FHA Facts”. Their “facts” are cold comfort to the half million working-class families getting loans from the FHA since 2008 who will lose their homes... More

The CBO on the National Debt - 2/06/13

$8.7 trillion in new publicly-held debt over the decade, bringing the total to just shy of $20 trillion. In 2023 alone, interest on the debt will be nearly $900 billion, four times today’s level.

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Europe's Pulse - 2/06/13

Despite this return in financial confidence, Europe’s real economy remains sick.

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Young Adults Exit Workforce - 2/05/13

Breaking down the jobless reports by age group, we find that the biggest gain in jobs for the month was enjoyed by U.S. teenagers, as individuals Age 16-19 saw their numbers in the U.S. workforce increase by 106,000 to reach a total of 4,508,000. But you can't have a gain of 106,000 workers between the ages of 16 and 19 and only a net gain of just 17,000 people in the workforce for the month unless a lot of other people ... More

Texas Oil Colossus - 2/05/13

Oil output has doubled over the last three years and completely reversed a 22-year decline.

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Default: Illinois or Iraq? - 2/03/13

According to CMA, which regularly ranks the highest government default probabilities in the world based on the cost of insuring public debt, Illinois was ranked last month the 8th most likely default candidate worldwide, and the only American state on the list.

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Cell Phone Tax Bonanza - 2/03/13

U.S. wireless consumers pay an average 17.18 percent in taxes and fees on their cell phone bill, including 11.36 percent in state and local charges, according to a newly released study that identifies and calculates wireless taxes and fees.

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Ahead of Tax Man - 2/01/13

Most of the 2.6 percent increase in incomes last month involved companies that accelerated dividends, bonuses and other payments into 2012 before higher tax rates kicked in for 2013. Personal dividend income, for example, rose at a seasonally adjusted monthly rate of 34.3 percent in December versus 4.5 percent in November.

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Deficits After ATRA - 2/01/13

The American Taxpayer Relief Act, the New Year’s legislation that effectively forestalled the bulk of the January 2013 fiscal cliff, probably staved off a recession. But compared to doing nothing, Congress made the deficit worse by passing ATRA.

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