…which one do you turn to? Prime-age EPOP? U6-U3?… Definitely not a good measure right now: the unemployment rate…. The decline in U3 doesn’t seem to be matching up with the movements in the wage growth data…. How about the difference between U3 and the U6 measure of unemployment? Similar…. How about prime-age EPOP?… It works here. Looks to me that the up-tick in ECI growth seems to be happening around the same time as the up-tick in the growth of the prime-age EPOP…. I thought it was interesting how well prime-age EPOP did and that it tracked ECI so well.

…Temptation goods… generate positive utility for the self that consumes them, but not for any previous self that anticipates that they will be consumed…. The assumption… that the fraction of the marginal dollar that is spent on temptation goods decreases with overall consumption has a number of striking implications for the… behavior of the poor…. Predicted behaviors under the declining temptation assumption can help us explain some of the puzzling facts about the poor that have been emphasized in the recent literature.

But long US rates continue to hover around 2%…. The stronger dollar does negatively impact growth, but market participants expect a monetary offset. Hence… the ball is in the Federal Reserve’s court… assuming the Federal Reserve takes sufficient note of the rising dollar, and its impact on inflation…. Paul Krugman is lamenting the possibility that some FOMC members interpret falling interest rates as reason to tighten policy more aggressively–a view primarily outlined by New York Federal Reserve President William Dudley…. Dudley’s stance clearly opens the door to the possibility of the Fed running an excessively tight policy stance, which wouldn’t happen if they took their inflation target seriously.

…(1) Inequality doesn’t matter, poverty does; (2) Inequality only matters if it comes through corruption, and in that case it’s just a symptom…. Both have a kernel of truth…. [But] caring about poverty and corruption does not eliminate the case for concern about inequality that does not arise from corruption in a relatively wealthy society… because (1) of our sense of fairness, and (2) the fact that opportunities or capacities are unevenly distributed, independent of any additional corruption that may exacerbate inequality further…. It feels a little silly to even make it. But I’ve seen both of the above objections with such frequency that I feel like I have to…. How do we think about Aristotle’s principle in a recursive system? Is redistributing capital ‘making unequal things equal’ or is failing to redistribute capital ‘making equal things unequal’? This is tricky enough in one generation because you have to distinguish between effort and luck of birth…. It gets very hard indeed when we move beyond one generation, because the choices of parents become the endowments of children…

There is no evidence in the extensive record of congressional committee hearings or debates that this is what Congress intended. The members of Congress who in fact drafted the legislation have represented [PDF] to the Supreme Court that this claim is false. Moreover, the states [PDF] did not understand that premium tax credits would be limited to state-operated exchanges when they were deliberating…. The phrase ‘Exchange established by the State’ in fact appears ten times in the ACA…. As a condition of having a state Medicaid program… a state must, as of January 1, 2014 have in place procedures for enrolling in Medicaid and CHIP eligible individuals who are identified through an ‘Exchange established by the State.’… As a condition of approval of a state CHIP program, HHS must… review the benefits offered… by qualified health plans through an ‘Exchange established by the State’ and certify that they are least comparable…. So how can we avoid shutting down the Medicaid and CHIP programs, and destroying the individual insurance markets in two thirds of the states? It is simple. The court should read carefully all of the provisions of the law relevant to the federal exchange and premium tax credits so as to achieve a ‘harmonious whole,’ the way the court has often said statutes should be read…. The court must either decide that the word ‘by’ in § 1401 is the only word that matters in the ACA, and ignore over 50 provisions that support the contention that the federal marketplace can be, given the way the term is used in the statute as a term of art, an exchange established by the state…. [It can] use the doctrine of constitutional avoidance to rule for the plaintiffs since otherwise the threat to the states would raise constitutional coercion and notice requirements…. It can simply affirm the Fourth Circuit’s decision to defer to the IRS’s interpretation of the statute under Chevron…