You know the complaint: "I'm trying to find a job, but everywhere I look I see experience required. How am I supposed to accumulate experience if I need experience to gain experience?"

The U.S. economy bears little resemblance to the Jeffersonian ideal populists on both left and right sometimes appear to strive towards: a nation of small businesses owned by Midwestern families, ideally headed by yeoman farmers. This has all kinds of implications.

It is sad to see that Senator Reid appears to be willing to overturn long-standing Senate rules in order to reduce the level of scrutiny applied to appointments like Richard Cordray.

Due to the sheer size and importance of the energy sector, even seemingly small improvements in its functioning can bear enormous fruits, while big improvements, like the shale gas revolution, can be game-changers for the U.S. economy. 

The Founding Fathers granted the federal government several enumerated powers and a few implied ones. The Supreme Court, in NFIB v. Sebelius, decided to take that idea a few steps further and granted the federal government the authority to use its taxing power to compel the citizenry to do whatever it wants it to do, as long as it uses certain turns of phrase. 

Krugman compares the response of the Bush administration to the 2001 recession to that of the Obama administration to the Great Recession, and finds that president Bush oversaw a response that was quite superior.

It is a well-known fact that the Tea Party movement dealt the president his famous "shellacking" in the 2010 midterm election. Less well-known is the actual number of votes this new movement delivered — and the continuing effects these votes could have had in 2012.

Newly released data on insurance premia in California's health care exchange show that they are not true at all: for large numbers of people, premia will actually increase.