Winslow Sargeant, chief counsel for advocacy at the U.S. Small Business Administration, recently shared the following facts with the Senate Small Business Committee.

Output and profits per worker are at record highs, which helps explain the jobless recovery ahead.

California is a very large room, and perhaps that is why the state’s political machine has so long been able to ignore the multi-billion dollar elephant that is the state budget shortfall. But there comes a point where the size of the room is irrelevant. Where evasion is not only impermissible, but impossible. Where the only alternatives are fundamentally reworking long-standing policies—and being crushed... More

The federal individual income tax may be progressive – it collects at much higher rates from higher income groups – but the collection patterns of other taxes are quite different.

The housing bubble that preceded the last recession left many borrowers overleveraged once the recession struck. However, since the peak of the last business cycle in 2007, consumers have begun to deleverage their balance sheets. This trend is evident in the housing market where consumers have been reducing their exposure to mortgage debt by financing more home purchases with cash and reducing both the loan-to-value ratios... More

The chart of the U.S. personal savings rate shows that Americans have been saving between 5-6 percent of disposable personal income in every month for the last two years, and that's the highest level of savings since the mid-1990s.

In previous recessions, turkey production and consumption in the U.S. has risen. At least, that was the pattern in 1991, 2001 and even in 2008. But in 2009, something very different happened: both the quantity and price of turkeys plunged as the relative demand for turkeys plummeted.

Employment in federal regulatory agencies reaches an all-time high as a percent of the private workforce.

The International Monetary Fund is now predicting world real GDP growth this year of 4.6%, followed by 4.3% next year, and then 4.50% growth or above from 2012 to 2015.  If so, the 2010-2015 period would be the strongest growth for the world economy during a six-year period in at least 30 years.

How much money would the federal government collect under such a their plan? And what would an individual's income taxes look like if such a plan actually became law? To find out, look here.

The key challenge for bankers is figuring out what to do with the inflow of deposits. There aren’t a lot of great options out there right now.

Where do your federal tax dollars go?Many people don't know. To counter such misconceptions, a not-for-profit Washington-based group called Third Way has produced an itemized taxpayer receipt that helps show the spending issues the new Congress will face.

The number of federal workers earning $150,000 or more a year has soared tenfold in the past five years and doubled since President Obama took office, a USA Today analysis finds.

The collapse in the labor force participation rate has been one of the key stories of the great recession. The participation rate is the percentage of the working age population in the labor force. As the economy slowly recovers, an important question is what will happen to the participation rate over the next few years?

If the economy is growing at an annualized rate of 2.5% after adjusting for inflation, how much should we expect the unemployment rate to change? What if the economy grows by 5.5%? Or shrinks with a negative rate of growth of -1.5%? Better still, at what rate does the economy need to grow for enough jobs to be created to make the unemployment rate fall?

Rather than focus obsessively on the inapt comparison to Japan, the Fed should be more concerned about the growing similarities between the U.S. and 1970s Italy. Italy experienced financial crises in 1974 and 1976 spurred by large current account deficits, excessive public spending, and a central bank that acquired Italian government debt by printing money.

While educators are eager to forget the financial woes of the past two years and return to the familiar routine of steady budget increases, the fiscal outlook for America's fourteen thousand school districts is bleak--not just for next year, but for a half decade or more. This calls for a new mindset among educators and an unfamiliar, sometimes-uncomfortable commitment to productivity and ... More

In general terms, methodological shifts in government reporting have depressed reported inflation, moving the concept of the CPI away from being a measure of the cost of living needed to maintain a constant standard of living.

The ranks of the most expensive colleges have grown again: 100 institutions are charging $50,000 or more for tuition, fees, room, and board in 2010-11, according to a Chronicle analysis of data released last week by the College Board.

Over 317,000 waiters and waitresses have college degrees (over 8,000 of them have doctoral or professional degrees), along with over 80,000 bartenders, and over 18,000 parking lot attendants. All told, some 17,000,000 Americans with college degrees are doing jobs that the BLS says require less than the skill levels associated with a bachelor’s degree.