A short documentary film (~30 minutes) prepared by the NC Department of Commerce shows how supplemental funding for workforce development programs under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act have helped businesses, workers, and communities across the state.
Economic policy reports, blog postings, and media stories of interest:
Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute points out that more “college is not always the answer.”
The width of the path to the middle class is narrower than many people think: the inflation-adjusted wage of college graduates has not improved in a decade, and fewer now receive health and pension benefits, especially among young workers. A four-year college degree is not the panacea that many people think it is.
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There is plenty of snobbery afoot regarding college educations. I have heard esteemed academics — conservative and liberal — wrongly equate college graduates with “smart people” and “skilled workers.” And, I have heard many conservative and liberal educational policy experts demean destinations other than college. We need a nation that has and values all sorts of work and skills, which means providing decent pay and benefits for many types of jobs.
Simon Johnson warns people to be very afraid of “dynamic scoring.”
The macroeconomic models used to claim big growth effects for tax cuts are simply wrong – and completely at odds with the empirical evidence. A smart modeler can assume something different and show you that with a great deal of math, but this is just an assumption dressed up in a complicated fashion.
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Put more bluntly – there is no magic in the real world, just very large budget deficits. As Mr. Buckley puts it, “One cannot find in the economic data for the last 30 years any evidence that supply-side-based tax policy has delivered its promised benefits.”
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If you cut taxes, revenues will fall and deficits will increase. If you change the CBO’s scoring process to hide this fact – as is under consideration by leading Republicans on the House Budget Committee and the House Ways and Means Committee – you are engaging in exactly the same sort of deception that brought down Greece.
Economic policy reports, blog postings, and media stories of interest:
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