It ranks among the biggest forecasting errors ever. Back in 2001, the Congressional Budget Office projected federal budget surpluses of $5.6 trillion for 2002-2011. Instead we got $6.1 trillion of ...

Four years after the onset of the financial crisis -- in March 2008 Bear Stearns was rescued from failure -- we still lack a clear understanding of the underlying causes. Hundreds of studies and books ...

I read a Washington Post column of yours just after Christmas—the one about the fairness dilemma and how Baby Boomers need to take a hit on Social Security and Medicare. You’ve been making these ...

One curiosity of the cyber age is that the American public seems relatively unconcerned by what, arguably, is the biggest threat from the internet: attacks on the nation’s “critical infrastructure” — ...

1. Young people currently benefit from Social Security and Medicaid and will continue to enjoy its benefits when they get older. Samuelson mistakenly labels entitlement spending as a payout to today’s ...

Just in case you hadn't noticed, no one has elected Grover Norquist to anything. Still, he looms as a major obstacle to Congress reaching a deficit-reduction agreement needed to raise the federal debt ...

This is the summer of our discontent. As Americans celebrate July 4, they are mad at their leaders, mad at their government and mad at each other. A recent Pew poll finds that “public trust in ...

It isn’t often that economics raises the most profound questions of human existence, but recent work by economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton (husband and wife, both of Princeton University) comes ...

We aren’t stagnating, after all. Unless you’ve been hibernating in the Himalayas, you must know of the recent surge in economic inequality. It’s not just that the rich are getting richer. The rest of ...

We’ll know soon who won the fiercely contested midterm elections, but we already know who lost: We all did. This election has been a referendum on President Trump, which suits both Republicans and ...