Brad DeLong has another great post summarizing why the Bush tax cut and stimulus proposals bear some measure of responsibility for the jobs situation. Folks that give Bush a free pass saying that nothing would be different under Gore aren’t really considering all the ways that the President can affect short term job creation. The post quotes heavily from MaxSpeak, who also points out that the tax cuts and almost certain deficits would probably have negative consequences for the investment market today. Deficits usually lead to higher interest rates which are bad for stock market investments. Because people trade today on what they believe tomorrow holds, well… it doesn’t help anything as far as investment income is concerned (and this includes things like real estate, as my mortgage broker kept reminding me when I was locking in my interest rates).
Newsweek’s Daniel Gross explains the Consumer Price Index (here’s the official BLS site) in a very simple video. I could do without the goofy sound effects, but it’s a good, 2 minute explanation of how the government tracks inflation.
Per David Simon’s Berkeley talk, though, the video doesn’t go into why this matters. Perhaps they’ll cover that in the next installment of the Economics 101 series.
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