Texas Job Numbers and Inter-State Migration

Political Math’s piece on Texas’ amazing job growth has been getting a lot of attention around the ‘Net. As regular Pileus readers know and as Political Math’s piece confirms, job growth is largely a consequence of population growth, and population growth is largely a consequence of warm climate, low cost of living, low taxes, and [...]

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Reforming Trade Adjustment and Unemployment Assistance

Matthew Slaughter and Robert Lawrence have an interesting little proposal in the NY Times: abolishing Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA), rolling it into unemployment insurance, and reforming the program so as to reduce its work disincentives. They also advocate special tax treatment for unemployed workers’ expenditures on job retraining. They sell the plan, which they say [...]

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A Deficit-Neutral Plan to Slash Unemployment

While the U.S. economy has been officially out of recession for a while and growing at a decent clip (1.8% at a seasonally adjusted annual rate in the first quarter of this year, 3.1% in the last quarter of 2010 – see chart), unemployment remains very unusually high, 9.0% in April 2011 (seasonally adjusted), compared [...]

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