Obama spent his time lauding our least competitive areas of innovation, while giving the back of his hand to biomedical research, the area where we have the clear global advantage.

Since 2008, the net outflow of money the federal government borrowed to provide direct student loans has exploded, rising by $89.7 billion dollars, or 17.8% of the $504 billion discrepancy. In terms of the total increase in the national debt from FY2008 to FY2010, the explosion in student loans would account for 2.5% of the entire increase above and beyond the deficits the government ran in those years, both with the ... More

The number of companies departing California or diverting capital reached 204 last year, which was four times the previous year's record.

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There is a wide variation among industries in the share of income paid as federal taxes.

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We've grown numb to annual budget meltdowns - shortfalls of $20 billion have become the norm. But what is California's total debt? Would you believe at least $265 billion?

We always knew the mortgage interest deduction was unfair -- favoring those in high tax brackets with big houses over renters and low-income homeowners. But until we did the calculations -- as far as we know, the first of their kind -- we did not suspect the geographic dispersion of tax benefits would be so large.

Without more consumers flushing ever larger numbers of devalued dollars down ever greater numbers of drains, the Fed’s bubble-centered growth strategy (or for that matter the Treasury Department’s own trillions in fiscal stimulus) is a bust.

There are frequent claims that “nothing is made in America anymore,” because all of the manufacturing jobs and production have been outsourced to places like China, Mexico, and Korea. Really?

Is it the price of gas, bad weather, or unemployment?

State pension plans are in crisis. Yet, it is much worse than the states acknowledge. This chart illustrates that point.

Reports of increases in state and local tax collections often neglect to mention that local governments still face widening deficits. Why? Because the increases in revenues are coming off two years of declines and local governments still have a way to go to recover.

Healthcare and social assistance generated $210 billion in real wage gains from 2000 to 2009 (all in 2009 dollars). Next biggest was state and local government, which generated $151 billion in real wage gains. (The exact numbers change a lot if I change the end dates, but the pattern stays the same). On the other hand, the big losers were manufacturing (-$245 billion), information (-$56 billion), retail trade (-$24... More

Fannie and Freddie were under great political pressure to keep housing increasingly affordable (while at the same time promoting instruments that depended on the constantly rising price of housing) and to extend opportunities to historically “under-served” groups. Many of the new... More

It has long been true that California on its own would rank as one of the biggest economies of the world. But how do other American states compare with other countries? Taking the nearest equivalent country from 2009 data reveals some surprises. Who would have thought that, despite years of auto-industry hardship, the economy of Michigan is still the same size as Taiwan's?

Today’s NYT had a very interesting article asking, Is Law School A Losing Game?  The article left out one important fact, though, that might help explain why people still go to law school: jobs.

How much money will the U.S. federal government expect to collect from the Top 1% of American taxpayers if it changes their income tax rates?

By its very name, the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was advertised to increase investment. Yet years before this stimulus act was proposed, Austan Goolsbee, now chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, explained in his doctoral dissertation how investment tax credits might do little to stimulate investment during the life of the credit.

Economic freedom is the fundamental right of every human to control his or her own labor and property. In an economically free society, individuals are free to work, produce, consume, and invest in any way they please, with that freedom both protected by the state and unconstrained by the state.

This chart  shows the inflation-adjusted retail price of regular gasoline on an annual basis back to 1919. Here's what we know for sure:

The growth of regulation over the past ten years has been large but quite uneven. Take a look at the chart.

We were kind of amused over our year-end break to see that the lame-duck 111th U.S. Congress' Joint Economic Committee proclaiming that "the recovery from the Great Recession continues, and is occurring more quickly than the recoveries from the 2001 and 1990-1991 recessions."

The ABA is now making the case to persuade college students not to go to law school. According to the association, over the past 25 years law school tuition has consistently risen two times faster than inflation.

With a bevy of tax changes at year-end, this paycheck tool for 2011 will estimate what your paycheck will look like and, as a bonus feature, compare your net take home pay this year to what you would pay under the exact same income tax rates that applied for 2010.

A significantly smaller share of workers experienced any spell of unemployment in the last few years than in the other deep recessions of the past 50 years. That’s why the peaks above are higher for the mid-1970s recession and the early-1980s recession than for our recent recession.

On a pay-as-you-go basis, Social Security is reasonably solvent, requiring only a 17% total withholding (employer plus employee) to maintain current benefit formulas for the next several decades. On the other hand, on a pay-as-you-go basis, public sector pensions will require contributions of 66% of base salary to maintain current benefits into the foreseeable future.