In Michigan, in the mid-'80s, the unemployment rate goes way up because a lot of factories shut down. And then, the mid-2000s, to pick a date, the unemployment rate in Michigan isn't that much higher than in the rest of the country. But the main way that happened is people moved.
They set a low bar for Donald Trump, and he banged his head on it.
It's clear that the medium and long-run fiscal challenges facing the country have to do with the rise of entitlement spending, they have to do with the longer run imbalances that we've created in the structure of the system.
I believe - I'm not a political expert, but I believe there is a broad consensus, a middle ground if you will, that Democrats and Republicans, business people and workers can agree on, to get this - the economy growing faster, getting people back to work.
We enter the government essentially in a hotel that is on fire. We're throwing people from the windows into the pool to save their lives and this is the evaluation of the Olympic diving committee: Well, the splash was too big.
The president is 100 percent for extending the tax cuts for 98.7 percent of small businesses.
The only question where there is disagreement is should the highest income rates above a quarter million dollars a year go back to where they were under Bill Clinton. That is the dispute about the taxes.
If you're going to be an academic who's involved in the world of policy, you have to be involved in the world that exists.
Giving Northern Europe a veto over Southern Europe's budgets will not hold a monetary union together. The euro zone will continue to need the weaker countries to stomach decades of high unemployment to grind down wages.
My impression is the Trump administration is in imminent danger of violating the gunfighter's credo, which is 'Do not pick seven fights if you are carrying a six shooter.'
I'm pretty happy not to be an insider anymore. There's just no common ground. I don't know if it's distrust or that the politics is substantially more partisan than the public. But there's no pressure to make a grand bargain on fiscal matters, on growth, on anything.
At the time of the formation of the euro, I would say most American economists said that's not a good idea; that's not a currency area that makes sense. And the answer from Europe was, 'How is Missouri and Mississippi a currency area?' But the flaw in that was not recognizing the importance of mobility.
If a lobbyist sets up shop, or a lawyer, in which they're receiving income through what is something like a tax loophole so that it's not counting as corporate income, that is what this is counting as a small business.
I was named DC's funniest celebrity.
Cutting taxes for very high income people an average of more than $100,000 a year for people that make more than a million dollars a year is not an effective way to get the economy going.
For policy makers interested in using tax policy to stimulate investments or especially to smooth business cycle fluctuations, the results are not promising.
I am a data hound and so I usually end up working on whatever things I can find good data on. The rise of Internet commerce completely altered the amount of information you could gather on company behavior so I naturally drifted toward it.
If you had asked people in 1929, 'Here is what is about to happen. How much would you pay to avoid the Great Depression from occurring?' The answer is they would have paid a lot. They would have borrowed money if it could be used to prevent the Great Depression.
This recession is the deepest in our lifetimes, the deepest since 1929. If you take the people thrown out of work in the 1982 recession, the 1991 recession, the 2001 recession, not only is this bigger, this is bigger than all of those combined.
So more than 8 million people lost their jobs. It's going to take a significant push on our part and time before that comes down. I don't anticipate it coming down rapidly.
