Economic policy reports, blog postings, and media stories of interest:
John Quinterno of South by North Strategies recently was a guest on the radio interview show For Your Information, produced by Curtis Media Group. Quinterno and host Don Curtis discussed many of the issues currently confronting the North Carolina economy. Click below to listen to the conversation.
Writing in Spotlight, Shawn Fremstad of the Center for Economic and Policy Research proposes three improvements to the proposed supplemental poverty measure. Writes Fremstad:
Overhauling the poverty measure is sometimes presented as a technical issue, and the approach recommended by the NAS as a fait accompli that simply needs to be implemented without making any policy decisions. This isn’t the case. While there are a myriad of technical issues involved in operationalizing the NAS approach, there are also major policy questions . These include, most importantly, where to actually set the supplemental poverty threshold, a question that the NAS called “ultimately political.”
…
Three modifications to the SPM are essential: 1) the thresholds must be set at a minimally decent level, one that doesn’t continue to “define poverty down” as the current measure has; 2) education and basic savings should be treated as necessities rather than luxuries; and 3) the thresholds should be adjusted upward for families without health insurance. These modifications would improve the measure’s accuracy and are consistent with the overall approach NAS recommended.
Economic policy reports, blog postings, and media stories of interest:
Writing in The Financial Times, Robert Skidelsky asks “who governs — governments or financial markets?”
We are about to embark on a momentous experiment to discover which of the two stories about the economy is true. If, in fact, fiscal consolidation proves to be the royal road to recovery and fast growth then we might as well bury Keynes once and for all. If however, the financial markets and their political fuglemen turn out to be as “super-asinine” as Keynes thought they were, then the challenge that financial power poses to good government has to be squarely faced.
Email Sign-Up | 
RSS Feed
