Last week, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass) unveiled her first piece of legislation on the Senate floor — a proposal to allow students to borrow at the same rates as banks. While this move galvanizes the populist movement, the economics behind it does not quite add up. The interest rate on direct subsidized loans for undergrads … Continue reading
Two weeks ago, a grad student at UMass Amherst discovered a spreadsheet error in the Reinhart-Rogoff (R-R) paper, a paper that many austerity advocates cited as proof that too much debt cripples economic growth. In the days and weeks after the spreadsheet error fiasco, many were quick to draw significant implications from this event, calling … Continue reading
This week, half of the Major League Baseball (MLB) franchises celebrated their Opening Days, marking the first day of baseball season. Opening Day attendance can tell us a lot of things. For example, attendance at the Washington Nationals’ home opener was up 11% this year, due to high hopes for the team this season. But … Continue reading
Last Friday, among the flurry of amendments that the Senate passed before it adjourned for a two-week recess, the Brown-Vitter amendment, which pledged to end funding advantages to banks with more than $500 billion in assets, passed in a 99-0 vote. Great, right? Senator Vitter, one of the co-authors of the amendment, stated afterwards, “This … Continue reading
1) The Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, celebrated its three-year anniversary, but a Kaiser poll shows that Americans are still divided on it. A study from the American Action Forum also estimated that the ACA has cost 111 million paperwork burden hours. 2) Cyprus re-opened its banks on Thursday, with sharp limits on … Continue reading
This week has been a big week in immigration reform: legislation in the Senate and the House are both making significant progress, and even conservative Senator Rand Paul announced his support of a pathway to legalization on Tuesday. With this progress in mind, it is important to get the facts straight on what impact this … Continue reading
It’s budget season! Last week, the House Budget Committee released its annual budget proposal for FY 2014, the third iteration of the Ryan budget. But this year, for the first time since 2009, the Senate Budget Committee released its own proposal too. The release of both budgets last week was exciting not just for budget … Continue reading
The short answer is: maybe. On Wednesday, during the Senate Banking Committee hearing, Senator Elizabeth Warren grilled Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke on the $83 billion implicit subsidy that big banks receive from low interest rates. That night, Fox Business News’ Gerri Wilson misquoted the figure, expressing outrage over the “$83 trillion dollars, you know, … Continue reading
Last week, the Congressional Budget Office released an interesting infographic depicting the growth since 1972 in spending on federal means-tested programs and tax credits, such as Medicaid, the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as the Food Stamp program). The expansion of such programs has been staggering: … Continue reading
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