Daily Policy Digest
Economic Issues
| 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... |
| U.K. Experience Casts Doubt on Viability of Keynesian Remedies The U.K. economy has contracted by 0.5 percent cumulatively since September of 2010 -- a time span in which even Spain managed modest growth... |
| World Trade Grows, but Protectionism Still a Concern The global banking firm HSBC predicts that world trade will grow by close to 90 percent over the next 15 years... |
| Minimum Wage Myths that Keep Our Teens Out of Work In July 2007, the unemployment rate for 16- to 19-year-old workers was 15.3 percent; three years later, following a 41 percent increase in the federal minimum wage, the rate was 25.9 percent, says Pamela Villarreal, a senior fellow with the National Center for Policy Analysis... |
| Poverty Levels on Rise The official poverty rate is expected to rise from 15.1 percent in 2010 to as high as 15.7 percent in 2011 -- levels unseen in nearly half a century... |
| American Economic Mobility Readily Measurable By age 60, nearly 51 percent of Americans will have lived in a household earning $150,000 for at least one year; more than 32 percent at $200,000 for a year; and nearly 21 percent at $250,000 for at least one year... |
