John's posterous
Construction, Infrastructure and jobs
Used this for my presentation yesterday. Credit to Ethan Pollack for pulling much of this together.
On BBC today Re: Obama's deficit reduction plan
[cid:9511CA6B-28A0-47B7-A485-6FB2BC5D48B9@home]
CBO updated deficit projections and tax policy
2 Graphs on the debt deal and Non-security discretionary spending
The EPI budget team has crunched the numbers on the impact of the debt deal on non-security discretionary outlays over the next 10 years. With the immediate cuts and the trigger, we're looking at outlays well below 50-year lows, and close to the Republican budget proposal.
From the report: http://www.epi.org/publications/entry/7413/
"The NSD budget houses public goods benefiting all citizens, including nearly 90% of nondefense public investment (Pollack 2011). These include high-return investments in education, transportation infrastructure, and scientific and health research. The NSD budget also funds regulatory safeguards protecting our health, environment, and economy, such as food safety inspection, pollution control and abatement, and the Securities and Exchange Commission. As previously noted, the deal makes massive cuts to the NSD budget. As Figures A and B show, the firststage of the deal (its discretionary caps) reduces NSD from 3.5% of GDP in 2011 to 2% of GDP in 2021, its lowest level in over half a century. The second stage—a cap that will automatically activate (via sequestration) if the joint committee is not successful—would cut NSD down to 1.7% of GDP, a level comparable to the Republican budget resolution (Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget) passed earlier this year and well below the Bowles-Simpson fiscal commission report."
Friday pre-commute music
Debt and Jobs: Hot off the keyboard
Aside from the near-term cuts in the debt deal, there is a broader failure in the proposed package to address jobs. Unemployment is over 9% and will average over 8% in 2012 according to the blue-chip consensus forecast.
In particular, the debt deal did not include a continuation of the payroll tax holiday and extended unemployment insurance (UI) benefits – both of which were part of the December 2010 tax deal, and which will expire at the end of the year.
A quick analysis shows the overall impact (Table 1). (Multipliers from Zandi; jobs derived from historical relationship between GDP and employment). In total, failing to include these policies, plus the cuts, will lead to 1.8 million fewer jobs in 2012.
Link to EPI analysis TK.
See also New Economic Times.
Kids highlight of the vacation so far.
Sent from mobile.
Flight delay, but can see Capitol bldg from seat.
Sent from mobile.
Data and Replicaiton Analysis for Crain and Crain (2010)
Here is the data from Crain and Crain used to replicate:
This is the STATA data file. Short description is below.
*Short description of variables in STATA file.
With variable labels most variables are self explanatory. Here are a few that might warrant a description: countrynum This assigns a unique integer to each country, range is [0,30]. empty Identifies observations for which all data is complete. Data takes 0 if the observation has complete data or 1 if observation has any missing data.Note: This variable only applies to the original Crain & crain data. It was not updated for the new education variables.
emptyco Identifies the five countries omitted countries from the Crain & Crain regression. Takes 1 if one of the five countries; else 0. Below are the additional school variables we have added in. If you just want the original C&C data, disregard and/or drop these variables. school primary school enrollment, % gross lnschool_enrol natural log of school variable. lnschool_enrol = ln(school) com_upd primary school completion. This is an update of of C&C's education variable and has data through 2008. lncom_upd natural log of com_upd variable. lncom_upd Finally, if you just want the original data given to us by Crain & Crain [NOTE: data was provided by Crain and Crain to a third party, which we then obtained] without any of our created variables, just KEEP the following;
country
code
year
GDP
trade
regulation
population
broadband
education
