Peter Orszag: Good U.S. Jobs News Can Be Found in Big Business
Big business, we keep being told, has been so hampered by regulatory uncertainty over the past few years, it has been reluctant to hire workers.
So it is surprising to read the results of a little-known survey from the Bureau of Labor Statistics: Very large businesses, it turns out, have been expanding their domestic workforces relatively rapidly. If, since January 2011, businesses of all sizes had hired at the same rate as those with 5,000 or more employees, we would have almost 4 million more jobs today.
By virtue of being born in the wrong year, today’s college grads are doing far worse — and research shows that that disadvantage is likely to stick with them for years to come.
We are crossing a huge chasm from an industrial society to an information society. And there is immense pain in that transformation.
Larry Summers: How To Avoid A Lost Decade - We need short-term stimulus to curb the long-term debt
“The greatest threat to the nation’s creditworthiness is a sustained period of slow growth that, as in southern Europe, causes debt-to-GDP ratios to soar. Discussions about medium-term measures to restrain spending and raise revenue need to be coupled with a focus on near-term growth. Without the payroll tax cuts and unemployment insurance negotiated by the president and Congress last fall, we might well be looking at the possibility of a double-dip recession. Substantial withdrawal of fiscal support for demand at the end of 2011 would be premature. Fiscal support should, in fact, be expanded by providing the payroll tax cut to employers as well as employees. Raising the share of the payroll tax cut from 2 percent to 3 percent would be desirable as well.”
