Daily Policy Digest
Economic Issues
| Economic Recovery Is Weakest since World War II Investment in housing, which grew an average of 34 percent in other cases of postwar recovery, has only grown 8 percent in the past three years... |
| A Survey on the Economic Effects of Los Angeles County's Plastic Bag Ban Stores inside Los Angeles County's plastic bag ban area reduced their employment by more than 10 percent; stores outside the ban area increased their employment by 2.4 percent, says Pamela Villarreal, a senior fellow with the National Center for Policy Analysis... |
| Swings in Commercial and Residential Land Prices in the United States Residential land prices have been more variable than the prices of housing structures... |
| Sluggish Labor Market in July The labor force participation rate fell by 0.1 percentage points to 63.7 percent as 150,000 workers left the workforce in July, contrary to predictions of a summer jobs recovery... |
| Private Debt Is Crippling the Economy Rather than public policy seeking to make borrowing cheaper, American leaders need to allow for household balance sheets to deleverage... |
| Obama Policies Hurt Less-Skilled Workers Most In the Obama years, high school dropouts have faced unemployment rates of 14 percent or more, well above the 8 percent of previous administrations... |
| U.S. Faces Uphill Battle in Retraining the Jobless In 2011, only about 38 percent of the 110,776 people who went through the federal dislocated-worker training program landed the kind of jobs for which they were trained... |
| The Mismeasure of Inequality There is a body of research indicating that consumption inequality is not only substantially lower than income inequality, but has been declining in recent years... |
| States' Hidden Jobless Woes Among the 50 states, the average unemployment rate is 8.5 percent while the underemployment rate rests much higher at 15.3 percent... |
| Land-Use Regulation Increases Income Inequality The freedom to easily move faded after 1980 as land-use regulation in many of the highest-income states made housing unaffordable to low-income workers... |
