Hesitant private investment in housing sector is drag on economy. See Evan Soltas below.
NBC:
The Obama administration has offered a one-year break to employers who were supposed to start offering health insurance to their workers next year.
The 2010 health reform law required anyone with 50 or more workers to provide health insurance – something small businesses have been complaining about, loudly, for years. On Tuesday the government said they could have more time to get it done.
Saying the goal is to implement reform in “a careful, thoughtful manner”, assistant Treasury secretary Mark Mazur said the administration would spend the extra year finding ways to simplify the process.
Postpone health tax on companies, but go ahead w/ penalty on individuals? Political consultant not been born who couldn't make hay of that.
— @billmon1
Salon:
Huge document dump shows how Church protected abusers
"So many of the guys who let this happen remain in positions of authority in the church today."
I don't see why Texas wouldn't go for this RT @TheRealDaveShaw I really think unborn children should be tax deductible #txlege #hb2
— @EricaGrieder
Jared Bernstein:
A few weeks ago I wrote about the role of the safety net to catch folks buffeted by market failure. I argued that the evidence showed that programs like Unemployment Insurance and food stamps (now called SNAP) performed well in this regard, ramping up to meet the increased need induced by the great recession.
That’s a short-term, “counter-cyclical” argument: when the economy goes down, we should unapologetically expect the safety net goes up (and vice-versa). But new research from poverty scholars Hilary Hoynes and Diane Schanzenbach provides evidence of important impacts that go well beyond the business cycle:
More politics and policy below the fold.
By a 42/39 margin TX Republicans want Ted Cruz to run for President in 2016. By a 69/18 margin they do NOT want Rick Perry to
— @ppppolls
Evan Soltas:
Welcome to the third quarter. Its first week is a busy one for economic-data releases, with new data on purchasing-manager confidence, jobless claims, nonfarm payrolls and the unemployment rate.
Among the figures, here's perhaps the central question for this quarter: Why is private investment still so weak? And is it about to roar back?
Spending on personal consumption, adjusted for inflation, has grown $441 billion, or 4.7 percent, since the start of the recession. Real private investment, by contrast, is still $206 billion short of its pre-recession level.
It's only when you put aside homes and commercial structures that investment has grown. And that gets to the problem: Businesses and households have been reluctant to make longer-term economic commitments. Most important, they're afraid of building. Investment in residential and commercial real estate, once 9 percent of gross domestic product, is still half that. (See the graph above.)
NY Times on the crisis in Egypt:
The Muslim Brotherhood, among the most powerful forces in Egypt, is facing perhaps the worst crisis in its 80-year history. Its members have been gunned down in the streets. Its new headquarters have been ransacked and burned, its political leader, President Mohamed Morsi, abandoned, threatened and isolated by old foes and recent allies.
Samer Shehata:
Egypt has a dilemma: its politics are dominated by democrats who are not liberals and liberals who are not democrats.
Blake Zeff:
How epic GOP bumbling could inadvertently save food stamps
GOP felt $20 billion in cuts to the poor weren’t enough, so it killed the bill. The likely result? Fewer cuts. Oops.
Richard L. Hasen:
Are the Liberal Justices Savvy or Suckers?
There’s no way for us to know what’s really going on behind the scenes at the Supreme Court. Leaks are exceedingly rare, and it will likely be decades before we get a peek at some justice’s papers to piece together the coalitions and strategies (we haven’t seen any papers from 2000’s Bush v. Gore yet, for example). But I can imagine three reasons the liberals might be savvier than they first appear to be.
Anything that Richard Hasen writes is worth reading.