The Truth About America’s Improving Economy
What’s helping America’s booming economy? The Joint Economic Committee Republicans have compiled the most egregious misstatements of economic facts made during our last hearing on the positive impact of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Real reforms get real results.
The Fed and the “Goldilocks” Economy
GDP growth has recovered to its historical average, job growth is strong, unemployment low, and inflation moderate—a scenario New York Federal Reserve Bank President John Williams has described as a “Goldilocks economy.”
Take-Home Pay up 4.9%
A recent Wall Street Journal op-ed clearly illustrates how workers are benefitting from the strong economy and tax reform. Specifically, it shows how a typical married couple with no children receives a $2,501 increase (4.9 percent) in take-home pay over one year due to rising incomes and lower taxe...
August 2018 Jobs Review
This was another strong jobs report. Most notably, the average hourly earnings (AHE) of workers are rising the fastest since mid-2009 when the last recession ended. It understates workers’ gains as AHE excludes benefits and is sensitive to the workforce’s changing composition. As workers left behind...
Real Wages are Rising
There are different ways to measure worker pay and to adjust for inflation. The chart’s green bars show the “Real Earnings” series, which at first blush suggests slowing real wage growth but uses unreliable wage and inflation measures. The red bars use the Employment Cost Index, a more direct measur...
Pro-Growth Policies Benefit Workers Left Behind in the Obama Recovery
Since the beginning of a Republican administration and Congress in January 2017, the unemployment rates among those workers who face the greatest challenges in the job market have fallen drastically. Among those with less formal educations, the unemployment rates of blacks, Hispanics, and whites hav...
All the Lonely Americans?
Is America in the middle of a loneliness epidemic? Claims of rising loneliness are often part of a larger narrative about fraying social bonds in America. In this framing, loneliness is seen as one symptom among many of a larger set of problems.
Pro-Growth Policies Create More Jobs
The upward revisions of Congressional Budget Office (CBO) job creation projections for 2018 and the even higher actual average so far this year show the positive impact of pro-growth policies. The first three bars in the chart show the date CBO published its projections (assuming then-current law re...
Democrats Want to Spend $42.5 Trillion More
The policies Democrats want to implement would cost $42.5 trillion over the next decade according to Brian Riedl of the Manhattan Institute, who calculates that an 87% value-added tax (VAT) would be needed—on top of existing taxes—to pay for Democrats’ plans. Furthermore, such a new tax would still ...
July 2018 Jobs Review
This employment report shows the U.S. economy is continuing to gain strength. Though job creation was dampened by the bankruptcy of Toys ‘R’ Us, BLS found that in May and June, 59,000 more jobs were created than was estimated earlier.
