New economic stimulus idea??

Via the Environmental Economics blog

Officials on the Town of Boone’s Greenway, Parks, and Gardens Committee will discuss the possibility of prohibiting bicycles and joggers on portions of the Greenway Trail at their regular meeting Tuesday evening. Officials with the Town of Boone’s Public Works’ Office said this topic would be open for public comment.

via www.goblueridge.net

Maybe those bicyclists and joggers would help the local economy if they got into their cars and drove to BK or the health club instead.

Hayek and Keynes do the rap

Check it out

Emmanuel Saez on income distribution

Congrats to Emmanuel Saez earning the 2009 John Bates Clark Medal.

One of his key contributions is showing us what is happening at the (upper) tail of the income distribution.

Joe Biden, Live from NY (SNL style)

Debt details. In pictures

From the CRS report, The Federal Government Debt: Its Size and Economic Significance, 2007.

See p. 5 for composition and debt holders.
See p. 7 for interest payments vs. economic growth.

Job Openings and Unemployment

Job Openings and Unemployment

By Aaron Pacitti

10 November, 2009

The October employment situation showed an increase in the unemployment rate from 9.8% to 10.2%. Similar, but more dramatic, was the rise in the labor underutilization rate—what the BLS calls U-6, which includes unemployed workers, marginally attached workers, discouraged workers, and involuntary part-time employment. This measure rose from 17.0% to 17.5%. U-6 is the broadest and most comprehensive measure of labor market slack.

Today, the BLS released its Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey for September 2009. The data, presented in Figure 1, show an increase of 104,000 job openings from August to September.

The above picture suggests that the decrease in job openings may be leveling off, though nowhere near the level needed to provide a sustainable and substantial labor market recovery. For example, there are 6.8 unemployed worker for every job opening. Additionally, there are 12.2 underemployed workers (taken from the measure of U-6) for every job opening. These trends are shown in Figure 2.

Each of these measures shows a slight decrease and a potential leveling off in the number of unemployed and underemployed workers per job opening. While this is a welcome development, one must be cautious for two reasons. First, to the extent that the economy is recovering from the Great Recession, this recovery is and will continue to be fragile. There are ample signs that we could be in for a double-dip recession, or a W-shaped growth path. For example, the commercial real estate bubble is beginning to show signs of popping and the residential real estate bubble has been artificially inflated by the home-buyers tax credit. Continued weakness on both consumers’ and firms’ balance sheets suggest that recovery will be far from robust. Indeed, personal bankruptcies rose 28% since October 2008 and banks continue to tighten lending standards. Secondly, such intense completion for jobs will almost certainly keep wages depressed for the foreseeable future. This, too, will depress consumption levels and cause the recovery to be more fragile than it otherwise would be.

Taken as a whole, the uptick in job openings and the decline in the number of unemployed and underemployed workers per job opening should not be taken as a sign of labor market recovery. While these trends could portend a modest rebound in the labor market, aggregate economic conditions are working against a sustained labor market recovery.

Job Losses from Defense Spending

As usual, Dean Baker puts ridiculous arguments in the proper context.

The Job Loss from Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions and the Job Loss from Defense Spending

from Real-World Economics Review Blog by deanbaker1

There is a major national ad campaign, funded by the oil industry and other usual suspects, to convince the public that measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) and slow global warming will result in massive job loss. This ad campaign warns of slower growth and the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs, possibly even millions of jobs, if some variation of the current proposals being debated by Congress get passed into law.