Daily Policy Digest
Economic Issues
| Young Adults: Fewer Homes, Fewer Cars, Less Debt From 2007 to 2010, adults younger than age 35 lowered their median household debt by 29 percent compared with just an 8 percent decline in households headed by adults age 35 and older... |
| Balancing State Balance Sheets States, acting as a financial investor, should hold and manage a diversified portfolio of assets that increase the resilience and flexibility of that state to adjust to periodic systemic financial risk... |
| Policy Uncertainty Undermines Economic Recovery The average increase in policy uncertainty between 2006 and 2011 led to a 2.5 percent drop in industrial production and 2.4 million fewer jobs in the United States... |
| Diminishing Quality of Fiscal Institutions in the United States The debt-to-gross domestic product ratio increased from 55 percent in 2001 to 67 percent in 2007 to 107 percent in 2012... |
| Texas and the Recipe for Growth Following the financial crisis, when the overall job growth rate was 0.4 percent, Texas' job market grew by 2.4 percent, says Wendell Cox, an adjunct scholar with the National Center for Policy Analysis... |
| The Job Market: Is College Overrated? Colleges have turned out more than a quarter of a million education degrees annually since 2000, despite estimates that only 539,100 teaching positions will be available between 2010 and 2020, says Pamela Villarreal, a senior fellow with the National Center for Policy Analysis... |
| Traffic Congestion Wastes Fuel and Time The total financial cost of congestion is $121 billion, of which $27 billion is wasted time and diesel fuel from trucks moving goods... |
| Five Percent of Credit Reports Contain Costly Mistakes The Federal Trade Commission says that 5 percent of U.S. consumers have an error on their credit report that could lead to them paying more for products such as auto loans and insurance... |
| The World's Most Expensive Cities Currency effects in Zurich drove expenses down 39 percent relative to New York, dropping the Swiss city from the world's most expensive a year ago to seventh place this year... |
| Questions Raised by the Congressional Budget Office Report Although the Congressional Budget Office's economic approach is typical among forecasters and historically unbiased, the economy's persistent failure to launch as predicted raises questions... |
