Recovery.gov
The White House’s Recovery.gov Web site, which tracks how stimulus money has been spent, recently posted a new map animation by the visualization expert Edward Tufte that shows where Recovery Act grants have been awarded. (Click the photo above to see the full animation.)
It’s worth checking out in full. One question that immediately jumps out: Why has Nevada received relatively scant stimulus grants even though it has fared so very poorly in both economic output and unemployment?
Think your annual income tax return is complicated now? Imagine if you had to calculate a new tax rate for each additional $2,000 of income you earned.
That was the case for many households in 1975. Check out the chart below, published in a new report from the Joint Committee on Taxation, which shows the tax bracket structure for married individuals filing joint returns, all shown in 2010 dollars:
Present Law and Historical Overview of the Federal Tax System, staff of the Joint Committee on TaxationThe orange line represents the tax structure for 2010, and each “step” in the line is a new tax bracket at a new tax rate. Compare that to the blue dotted line representing the tax structure for 1975.
One obvious difference between the two lines is that the highest marginal tax rates are much lower today than they were in the past, a point that many others have made in calls for allowing the high-income Bush tax cuts to expire. But there’s another major difference: In the blue dotted line for 1975, the “steps” are much narrower and generally much shorter in comparison to the “steps” from 2010.
In other words, tax brackets were much more incremental in 1975. Here they are in table form, where the left-hand column shows the income range and the right-hand column shows the federal personal income taxes owed: Read more…
Olivier Hoslet/European Pressphoto Agency Klaus Regling, left, president of the Eurogroup, with Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker of Luxembourg and Olli Rehn, the European monetary affairs commissioner, at news conference in Brussels on Nov. 16.
Simon Johnson, the former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, is the co-author of “13 Bankers.”
The big question of the week in Europe is deceptively simple — will any countries that share the euro as their currency default on their government or bank debts in the foreseeable future? The answer to this question determines how you regard bonds from Portugal, Spain, Italy, Belgium and, perhaps, others, as well.
This question is not as simple as it seems. Answering it involves taking a view on three intricate issues: What exactly is the current euro-zone policy on bailouts, can big euro-zone countries really be bailed out if needed and what happens to the politics of these countries and of the euro zone as a whole, as pressure from the financial markets mounts?
The prevailing consensus — and the official spin — is that European leaders backed away last weekend from the German proposal to impose losses on creditors as a condition of future bailouts, starting in 2013. In this view, the markets should calm (and are likely to) as there is no immediate prospect of any kind of sovereign default or, as the more polite like to say, a “reprofiling” of debt, including the obligations of big banks.
But a close reading of the Eurogroup ministers’ statement from Sunday suggests quite a different interpretation. It’s a straightforward text, just two and a half pages long, but it has potentially momentous consequences — as it envisages dividing future euro-zone crises into two kinds.
Read more…
Via the Stats of the States release from the National Center for Health Statistics, here’s a neat map showing the percentage of each state’s adult residents who live in households with only wireless phones (i.e., no landlines):
Who would have guessed that California was more tied to landlines than, say, Utah?
My colleague Steven Greenhouse, who just wrote up a post about some fascinating research on work-life balance, also passes along this tidbit from Susan Bianchi’s study:
Some observers have suggested that the rapid decline in fertility to very low levels in Southern and Eastern Europe and some countries in Asia, most notably Japan, is due to a lack of change in the family role expectations for women in these countries (McDonald, 2000). In countries where women’s labor market opportunities expand but women are still expected to do most of the housework and childcare with little assistance from men, many women exercise the only choice available; they remain childless when work and family roles are too difficult to reconcile. Perhaps even in the U.S., motherhood may be foregone as women devote time to careers and face the difficulty of “fitting it all” in when jobs are both fulfilling but also demanding of time and energy. Currently in the U.S., among women age 40 to 44, 20 percent have never had a child, double the percentage 30 years ago, and this percentage rises to 27 percent for those with graduate or professional degrees (Dye, 2007). [emphasis added]
As we noted in a recent post based on a Pew Research Center report, however, as of 2008 greater education was generally associated with lower rates of motherhood — except for women with the most advanced degrees. That is, women with professional degrees and Ph.D.’s are slightly more likely to have had children than their counterparts with just master’s or bachelor’s degrees.
And compared to their equally educated counterparts from the early 1990s, today’s advanced-degree women are actually much more likely to have borne children by age 44. More than a third of these women with professional/Ph.D. degrees in 1992-94 decided to forgo having children; in 2006-8, less than a quarter of such women made the same choice.
Perhaps this means that the employers of the most educated women have indeed been convinced to provide more flexible work arrangements, as Claudia Goldin has found for at least some careers. Maybe a real-life “Idiocracy” won’t be in our future, after all.
Filip Kwiatkowski for The New York TimesA new study finds that delayed marriage and childbearing are leading to increased stress for American men and women in balancing work and family obligations.
Noting that the median age for first marriage is 28 for men and 26 for women, the study, “Family Change and Time Allocation in American Families,” says, “Delayed marriage and childbearing heighten the likelihood that the greatest childrearing demands come at the same time that job and career demands are great – particularly among the well-educated.”
The study adds, “Delayed childbearing also increases the likelihood that one’s parents may begin to suffer ill health and need assistance before one’s children are fully launched.” In other words, many men and women feel hugely stretched and stressed trying to help out their not fully launched twenty-something children at the same time the health of their octogenarian parents is failing.
The study, done by Suzanne M. Bianchi, a professor of sociology at the University of California at Los Angeles, was released on Tuesday as part of Focus on Workplace Flexibility, a conference co-sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and Georgetown University Law Center to examine worklife issues and encourage more employers to give flexibility to their workers.
In research based on time diaries, Professor Bianchi found that as American mothers have increased their labor force participation rate, they are devoting fewer hours to housework, but have maintained their hours devoted to childrearing. Read more…
Casey B. Mulligan is an economics professor at the University of Chicago.
President Obama’s bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform meets today and is expected to release its final recommendations soon on balancing the federal budget.
Progressives hope that the federal government will raise revenue mainly, if not exclusively, by levying taxes on wealthy Americans. But a comparison of France and the United States suggests that raising tax revenue will ultimately involve increasing tax rates on the poor much more than they would be increased on the wealthy.
Because the federal individual income tax is “progressive” — the tax is collected at higher rates from higher-earning groups — it is easy to assume that big government involves high tax rates on wealthy taxpayers without commensurately high tax rates on poorer taxpayers.
However, the individual income tax brings in only a minority of government revenue. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, most taxpayers in Western European countries — countries known for their relatively generous welfare states — pay a smaller fraction of their income in individual income tax than Americans do (to view the O.E.C.D. data, click here, then on the “tax” pull-down menu, click on the second item, “Of individuals”).
Read more…
5:29 p.m. | Updated
The Daily Beast has put together a list of novels about job loss. They are:
To that list I’d add “Then We Came to the End,” by Joshua Ferris. Any other recommendations, readers?
Update: My colleague Motoko Rich had an article earlier this year about some recent “memoirs and novels that describe the fallout of losing a job, losing a house or losing an investment account.”
In another sign that financial comparisons with 2009 will make almost anyone look good, state tax revenues in the third quarter were up 2.6 percent in inflation-adjusted terms compared with last year.
Rockefeller Institute of Government “PIT” refers to personal income taxes.According to preliminary tax collection data compiled by the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government, 48 early reporting states collected 3.9 percent more in taxes, in nominal terms, from July through September 2010 than in the same period in 2009. Still, don’t get too excited: tax collections were 7 percent below the same period two years ago, which means the pain that many states have been feeling is not likely to recede yet.
Forty-two states showed gains, with overall advances breaking down to $2.5 billion more in personal income taxes and $2 billion more in sales taxes. In dollar terms, New York reported the largest increase in total tax collection, up $577 million, or 4.5 percent.
Two states reported hefty declines in tax revenues. Although Alaska has positioned itself as a federal aid magnet, its tax collections declined 48.1 percent in the third quarter, in part because of reductions in oil and gas prices and production. Hawaii’s third-quarter tax revenues dropped 13.6 percent, largely because of a 53.7 percent slide in personal income taxes.
Imagine if you had to calculate a new tax rate for each additional $2,000 of income you earned. That was the case for many households in 1975.
A new study finds that delayed marriage and childbearing are leading to increased stress for American men and women in balancing work and family obligations.
A comparison of France and the United States suggests that increasing tax revenue will ultimately put a burden on the poor, not the wealthy, an economist writes.
If Republicans want to become the party of long-run economic success, they will also need to become the party of human capital by advocating better investments in our young, an economist writes.
Two papers from the San Francisco Fed look at the connection between happiness and money, and happiness and suicide rates.
Catherine Rampell is the economics editor at nytimes.com.
David Leonhardt writes the Economic Scene column, which appears in The Times on Wednesdays.
Economists offer readers insights about the dismal science.
Economics doesn’t have to be complicated. It is the study of our lives — our jobs, our homes, our families and the little decisions we face every day. Here at Economix, David Leonhardt, Catherine Rampell and other contributors will analyze the news and use economics as a framework for thinking about the world. We welcome feedback, at economix@nytimes.com.
Faces, numbers and stories from behind the downturn.
A series about the surge in consumer debt and the lenders who made it possible.
A series exploring the origins of the financial crisis, from Washington to Wall Street.
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