The econ team at Goldman Sachs has found that higher unemployment “statistically boosts the growth in SSDI benefit recipients at the state level, consistent with the idea that SSDI applications and enrollment do not depend purely on objective health criteria but also on the state of the economy.” In effect, SSDI partly functions as a sort of long-term unemployment insurance.

Public pension funds have been increasingly active in putting forth shareholder proposals, including many on causes that have little to do with corporate performance. 

I am deeply aware of all the grim news for the U.S. economy during the last five years. But when the average household is spending $500/year on pets, according to a Census survey, it's a reminder that America's average standard of living remains quite high.

About half the benefits from tax expenditures in the income tax go to the top 20 percent of income earners. This roughly matches their share of income. But the share of taxes paid is actually more skewed: the top 20 percent of households pay 68 percent of all federal taxes and 94 percentMore

For each percentage point of the public sector workforce represented by unions, states are about one percent more likely to be rated as "very poorly managing their future liabilities" by the Pew Center on the States.  States that put limits on the power of public sector unions will likely see better managed state finances and more realistic plans for meeting current and future obligations to public sector... More

The main reason why Americans dislike dealing with the IRS is not, however, the bureaucrats’ fault. Congress keeps making the tax code more complex. It is now 4m words long, and has been changed over 4,000 times since 2001.

Presidents put the credibility of their economic agendas on the line when they submit budgets with revenue projections. Yet so many times, they miss their targets.

Ben Bernanke's bold experimentation with unorthodox monetary policy has not worked out quite the way he had anticipated. And this puts him in a position where he has an unenviable policy choice to make in the sense that he will be damned if he exits QE3 too quickly and damned if he does not.

America's public schools spent slightly less in 2011 than they did in 2010, according to a Census report, but the cost of employee benefits continued to grow, reflecting a 20-year trend in which benefit costs have risen much more rapidly than other spending, and consequently squeezed budgets.

Majorities of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents would vote against higher gas taxes.

As Congress moves closer to debating fundamental tax reform, the amount U.S. multinational firms pay in taxes on their foreign income has become a common topic for the press and among politicians. Some of the more sensational press stories and claims by politicians lead people to believe that U.S. companies pay little or nothing in taxes on their foreign earnings. Last year, even the president suggested the U.S. needs a... More

A number of industries can expect big changes in employee health insurance in the next year or two. Here are those industries whose companies are most likely to drop health benefits and send workers to insurance exchanges.

Folly, shortsightedness, and the desire of legislators to provide something for nothing are the  causes of Kansas' pension dilemma.

Dallas philanthropists may be the most civic-minded in the country. Over several decades, Dallas’ superrich have transformed their city, making it the “American capital of philanthropy,” according to Richard Fisher, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas and himself a member of the giving class.

Three times as many people in a European survey consider inflation the top problem facing them as consider health care and social security their top problem.

Late in 2011, after realizing that Spain had run up an exceptionally large budget deficit for the year, exceeding 8.5% of the nation's entire GDP, the newly elected government set out to get Spain's fiscal situation under control. Spain committed to a program of spending cuts and tax increases. The economy crashed. Why?

Did you notice how the U.S. economy was suddenly thrown into recession this year when tax increases and spending cuts took effect? If you didn’t, that’s no surprise because the economy actually accelerated to 2.5% growth in the first quarter of 2013 from just 0.6% growth in the fourth quarter of 2012.

As part of the “fiscal cliff” negotiations, Congress allowed the 2011-12 payroll tax cut to expire at the end of 2012, and the higher income that workers had grown accustomed to was gone. Here's what that meant for U.S. workers.

The latest survey from Chief Executive magazine reveals that states are growing more aggressive at competing with one another for jobs.

If technologies today spread much more quickly than they used to from rich to poor countries, how come the income divide between rich and poor nations remains so large?

The findings from the Oregon study of Medicaid are even worse than they look.

Highest paid public employee in every state is part of the higher education bubble.

A new study by Goldman Sach suggests the real jobless rate is probably more like 9%, still dreadful.

What would the U.S. unemployment rate be today if teens were part of the economic recovery?

How spending on public-employee pensions and health care is crowding out essential government services in states, cities, and other local-government jurisdictions.

From 1860 to 1910, between 13 percent and 15 percent of people in the United States were born in another country. After 1910, the share of the population composed of the foreign born began a steady decline, falling to less than 5 percent by 1970. But that share has increased rapidly since 1970, reaching about 13 percent in the past few years. About 40 million foreign-born people now live in the United States.

UCLA researchers have found that leading up to the Financial Crisis, subprime lenders employed a novel method of influencing the political process. In addition to campaign contributions to key politicians, they gave special treatment to borrowers represented by key congressional leaders.

The total outstanding government debt confronting California’s taxpayers is bigger than is generally known. Earlier this year, when Governor Brown referred to the $27.8 billion in state budgetary borrowings as a “Wall of Debt,” his intention was probably to warn Californians that balancing the state budget was only a first step towards achieving financial sustainability.

Fiscal instability is not only an issue nationally - driven largely by health care spending - but at the state and local levels as well. A More

Recent data  for median sale prices of new homes in the United States through March 2013 now confirm that there has been no slowdown in the rapid inflation of new home sale prices observed since July 2012.

The 2014 Obama budget includes a 28% cap on tax exemptions and deductions, a proposal the President has made so many times that people are beginning to suspect that he's serious about it. New York governor Andrew Cuomo harbors this suspicion. Cuomo's office has come out with an impressively detailed defense of the deduction for state and local taxes paid.

The discovery of a spreadsheet error in an influentia study by Harvard University economists inevitably raises a troubling question: To what extent can we trust what any researcher claims to be true?

Publicly available government data and common sense reject the notion that there are “too many” high-tech workers in the United States. More importantly, this entire discussion misses a larger point—high-skilled employment isn’t a zero sum game where a fixed set of workers are competing for a fixed set of jobs in an economy free from global competition.

Voters often defeat them. Here's why.