I'm generally put off by "Tea Party" people who rant and rave about Obama's birth certificate, "death panels," and dream of returning to the gold standard. But on one core point, I'm in a great deal of sympathy—Washington is often corrupted by powerful lobbyists who turn legislators away from helping ordinary Americans.

The latest example came in this week's financial reform debates in the Senate. The senators are grinding through drafts of financial regulation reform proposals aimed at preventing another meltdown. A necessary element is President Obama's proposed new consumer-protection agency that will guard against financial institutions who sell expensive and bloated products. But lobbyists for banks and financial institutions are all over the process, weakening it wherever they can.

This week's evidence comes from the bottom-feeding world of

February's job growth was another bust. The U.S. economy lost 36,000 jobs last month -- to keep up with the population growth the U.S. economy should be adding something close to 130,000 jobs. There are six people looking for jobs for every job vacancy.

What can we do to create more jobs?

Raising unemployment-insurance benefits -- a New Deal program that for political reasons rooted in Southern racial politics are state based rather than federal -- is the best way to create jobs dollar for dollar (see the Congressional Budget Office's recent report). The economics is simple. A dollar going to an unemployed person is immediately spent, propping up the tailor, butcher, and electricity maker, and, both poetically and paradoxically, a...

Universities have a peculiar personnel practice. It is called the "terminal year." Amy Bishop is reportedly in her terminal year. The standard terminal year contract allows a professor who is denied tenure to teach for the following year. On the surface the terminal year seems nice, quite accommodating to the professor. The professor keeps faculty status for a year while looking for their next teaching job and, perhaps, working through an appeals process. In fact, just a few years ago a terminated professor protested when Depaul University moved to not give him a terminal year; the professor claimed the university feared protests from students since he was a popular teacher.

But the terminal year is most often not good for professors and, with certainty, structurally bad for students. The terminal year is...

President Obama recently released his budget and Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell rendered his opinion: "more spending, more taxes, more debt."

Go Mitch. Things are looking up!

It's hard to say anything reassuring when a smaller percentage of adults are working than ever before - the employment ratios are just above 55 percent -- and one out of 10 people who want to work can't find jobs. Nevertheless Friday's unemployment numbers didn't show much worsening -- though, as the Economic Policy Institute points out, long-term unemployment is stubborn and scarring. Falling family incomes can cause children to delay or forgo a college education, sluggish demand can stop the...

Reeling from the Senate loss in Massachusetts, and fearing greater political losses in the midterm elections, the Obama Administration has proposed a spending freeze on domestic discretionary spending, coupled with a few small-bore ideas to help the "middle class." He is doing this to signal that he's serious about deficit reduction. Whoopee. (Bloggers are having a good deal of fun with Obama's repeated rejections of John McCain's proposed spending freeze during the Presidential campaign. Here is the painful stuff on YouTube.)

Why is a spending freeze a supremely bad idea? First, the math doesn't work. Obama's freeze will exempt military, veterans, and homeland-security related spending, and it can't touch mandatory spending, so it only applies to about 12 percent of the total federal budget. This means Obama's...

I wrote praising one aspect of Fed Chief's Bernanke's regime: "The Fed has correctly held interest rates effectively at zero, and should do so for some time to come. When faced with a potential depression, we need active government tools to fight it."

Low interest rates are a great way to fight a depression. But a commentator on my blog got it right: Low rates have creamed senior citizens who have had to rely on financial markets, including interest from savings and certificates of deposit as well as risky stocks and bonds to deliver stable pension income.

Couple the low interest rates and returns with high fees and we have a failed, if not corrupt, pension system. This all came about because...

Losing Ted Kennedy's Senate seat to a Republican may have doomed health-care reform, but it also may have revived chances for meaningful action on financial services. Earlier this week, the Obama Administration backed strong steps against big banks, proposals advocated by former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker which had been opposed by Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and chief economic adviser Larry Summers.

Senators Barbara Boxer and Russ Feingold say they won't support the reappointment of Ben Bernanke as Chairman of the Federal Reserve (Bernanke was orginally appointed by President Bush). While praising Bernanke for steps he's taken since the financial crisis exploded, both senators joined a growing, bipartisan chorus that criticizes him for failing to use the Fed's regulatory powers to head the...

On the day of the Massachusetts special election to fill the unexpired term of Ted Kennedy, the polls were predicting an upset win by the Republican candidate, who promised to be the "41st vote" to block passage of fundamental health-care reform. While people all over the country watched and waited for the returns, Wall Street traders cast their own votes in the form of big market bets. Coventry Health Care? Up 6 percent. Eli Lilly? Up 4.4 percent. And Humana, the big managed-care company? Up 7.1 percent.

It turns out those traders made a winning bet that a Republican victory would mean stopping health-care reform, which in turn would mean higher profits for insurance, managed care, and pharma companies.

Although economists know the stock market is a poor...

Finally, an important public commission -- the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission -- which was formed nine months ago to investigate the causes of the financial crisis -- is meeting in Washington on Wednesday and Thursday. This comes just in time to not influence financial-regulation legislation. I welcome the hearings but lament that the Commission is understaffed and underpowered. 

You -- yes you, ordinary citizen! -- can submit questions for the CEOs scheduled to appear: Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs; Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase; John Mack of Morgan Stanley; and Brian Moynihan of Bank of America.  What would you like to ask them?  (When I asked a friend of mine, he blurted out "Where the f**k...

My last post about the positive effects of the recession was sincere. Households stopped borrowing; gender roles are converging; and conservancies and governments can now afford to create parks by buying wild meadows and swamps from developers.

While in Atlanta at the American Economics Association (AEA) meetings I was in a two-handed mood. On the one hand, cancer can be positive -- family and friends become more important, character is built, blah blah blah.

On the other hand, this recession is horrible -- long-term unemployment has not been this high in over 50 years (watch here for Friday's announcement at 8:30 am), retirement...