Washington Post: Economy

• Bernanke's done, Obama kinda sorta says (Tue, 18 Jun 2013 18:27:51 GMT)
  

  The countdown may have officially begun for Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke.

  After seven tumultuous years, his term as head of the nation's central bank ends Jan. 31. He is widely expected not to stay on, though he has been mum on his official plans.

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• Jack Lew's new signature unveiled (Tue, 18 Jun 2013 18:13:01 GMT)
  

  One of the big questions about Jack Lew's tenure as Treasury secretary — what will his new signature look like on U.S. currency? — has been answered:

  The U.S. Treasury tweeted the new signature just after 2 p.m. Lew's old signature was the subject of intense attention and even some presidential ribbing earlier this year.

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• How the IRS keeps the $4.3 trillion nonprofit world secret (Tue, 18 Jun 2013 17:59:16 GMT)
  

  You've heard about the the Internal Revenue Service's habit of targeting conservative 501(c)(4) applicants for close scrutiny. You've also by now heard the criticisms that the IRS gave too little scrutiny to many other politicized groups that applied for 501(c)(4) nonprofit status. But Carl Malamud is suing the IRS over a problem you probably haven't heard about: the agency's unwillingness to let the rest of us easily scrutinize nonprofits.

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• So you think you're ready to walk on red-hot lava (Tue, 18 Jun 2013 17:14:19 GMT)
  

  Jason Kottke says this video of a man walking on hot lava "might be the dumbest thing on YouTube, which is saying quite a lot."

  And that does seem pretty dumb. Over at Wired, however, volcano blogger Erik Klemetti explains that it's technically possible to walk on some types of lava. It's probably not a great idea, though:

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• Bobby Jindal is the Republican Party's problem (Tue, 18 Jun 2013 17:11:39 GMT)
  

  After the 2012 election, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal made a name for himself as the most eager and aggressive of the GOP's self-flagellators. Republicans have to "stop being the stupid party," he raged. They have to compete for "the 47 percent and the 53 percent," and "any other combination of numbers that adds up to 100 percent." Above all, they need to "stop insulting the intelligence of voters."

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• Saving energy is great. But how much is actually possible? (Tue, 18 Jun 2013 15:33:36 GMT)
  

  It's something we hear from policymakers again and again: The world squanders too much energy. And wringing out that waste should be one of the easiest ways for the United States and other countries to save money and curb pollution.

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• Wonktalk: Can Avik Roy and Ezra Klein find common ground on Obamacare? (Tue, 18 Jun 2013 15:04:11 GMT)
  

  Of late, Forbes blogger and Manhattan Institute fellow Avik Roy has emerged as one of Obamacare's most persistent and popular conservative critics. We've gone back-and-forth a bit over the blogs (see here and here, for starters). But as you may have heard, blogs are dead. So I invited Avik into the famed WonkTalk studio ("Wonkdome") for an epochal, apocalyptic, health-care showdown.

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• Keeping undocumented immigrants off the dole is easier said than done (Tue, 18 Jun 2013 14:01:20 GMT)
  

  It hasn't been the best week for comprehensive immigration reform. David Drucker at the Washington Examiner reported that House Speaker John Boehner will not bring an immigration bill to the floor that doesn't have the support of most Republicans.That would rule out a path to passage in which a faction of the Republican House members break off from the party line to join the pro-immigrant Democrats. Add on a gaffe by an aide to Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who said that American workers "just can't cut it" at some jobs, and the pro-reform side is having a rough go of things.

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• Are slower-growing health care costs temporary or permanent? (Tue, 18 Jun 2013 13:02:22 GMT)
  

  It's one of the hottest debates in health care: Is the historically slow growth in health spending in recent years due to the lingering effects of the recession, or is it a fundamental change that augurs well for the future? The implications are huge if policymakers think the slowdown is only temporary, they might try to take steps to cut Medicare spending further, for example; if they think the improvement is permanent, they might cross their fingers and hope for the best.

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• Can state laws protect you from being watched by drones? (Tue, 18 Jun 2013 13:02:12 GMT)
  

  For most of the public, the word "drone" calls up the sleek, automated killing machines that the Obama administration routinely deploys against suspected terrorists and that Rand Paul (R-Ky.) filibustered on the floor of the Senate.

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• Wonkbook: Immigration reform isn't about Marco Rubio. It's about John Boehner. (Tue, 18 Jun 2013 11:44:42 GMT)
  

  Welcome to Wonkbook, Ezra Klein and Evan Soltas's morning policy news primer.To subscribe by e-mail, click here. Send comments, criticism, or ideas to Wonkbook at Gmail dot com. To read more by Ezra and his team, go to Wonkblog.

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• The best sentences we read today (Mon, 17 Jun 2013 23:28:08 GMT)
  

  -- "Anyone who has not made these clumsy forays into DIY taxidermy has probably never wondered where the dead things come from."

  -- "If bees go extinct, this is what your supermarket will look like."

  -- "China is pushing ahead with a sweeping plan to move 250 million rural residents into newly constructed towns and cities over the next dozen years." (Though see here for a counterpoint.)

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• Crossed signals over Fed’s stimulus efforts (Mon, 17 Jun 2013 23:02:00 GMT)
  

  The Federal Reserve’s new communication strategy was supposed to make it easier to decipher the intentions of the famously secretive institution.

  Markets, however, seem to have missed the memo.

  Investors increasingly have focused on predicting the moment the Fed will start to pull back on its massive stimulus program, causing more volatility in stocks and bond markets. Could it come as early as this week, when the central bank’s policymaking committee meets in Washington? Or will the Fed wait until the end of the year, when the fiscal drag is expected to have run its course? Will it make the announcement with a news conference or forge ahead with little explanation?

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• Volunteering lifts job prospects of the jobless (Mon, 17 Jun 2013 22:47:42 GMT)
  

  Unemployed Americans stand a much better chance of finding a paying job if they first work for free. That is the key finding from a new federal study that is billed as the first empirical examination of the benefits of volunteering for out-of-work Americans.

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• Volunteering lifts job prospects of the jobless (Mon, 17 Jun 2013 22:47:00 GMT)
  

  Unemployed Americans stand a much better chance of finding a paying job if they first work for free. That is the key finding from a new federal study that is billed as the first empirical examination of the benefits of volunteering for out-of-work Americans.

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• World economic group calls for global exchange of tax information to fight evasion (Mon, 17 Jun 2013 22:35:00 GMT)
  

  A top world economic group has called for the creation of a global system to automatically funnel financial information about individuals and companies from countries where their earnings and investments are located to jurisdictions where they might owe taxes.

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• What the Fed tapering debate and Justin Bieber obsession have in common (Mon, 17 Jun 2013 20:23:32 GMT)
  

  There is great hubbub over a Federal Reserve meeting this week at which nobody is expecting any policy change to be announced. And the reasons why have more to do with the strange psychology of markets than any information we're actually likely to get about the future of the central bank's policies.

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• The Supreme Court's decision on Arizona won't put an end to voting wars (Mon, 17 Jun 2013 19:18:12 GMT)
  

  How far can states go if they want to put in place tougher requirements for voter registration?

  That was one of the key questions at stake in a big Supreme Court decision released Monday, Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona. By a 7-2 vote, the justices ruled that Arizona could not require additional proof of citizenship on federal forms designed to make voter registration easier.

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• Congress is wildly unpopular. Should anyone actually care? (Mon, 17 Jun 2013 16:42:09 GMT)
  

  Sorry, guys (and yeah, Congress is mostly made up of guys):

  
  
  

  Polling about the overwhelming unpopularity of Congress is sometimes batted away with a knowing remark about how the public has been losing faith in most all institutions over the past 30 or 40 years. And there's something to that. But it's also worth being clear that Congress is much, much more unpopular than any institution Gallup has seen fit to poll:

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• Why does the government encourage people to build homes in wildfire zones? (Mon, 17 Jun 2013 16:29:07 GMT)
  

  Over the past week, a giant wildfire has ravaged Colorado Springs, destroying some 473 homes and damaging 17. It's the most destructive blaze in Colorado's history. So is there any way to reduce the damage from catastrophic fires in the future?

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• You don't know what America will look like in 2043, and neither does the government (Mon, 17 Jun 2013 15:52:00 GMT)
  

  Now that the 10-year budget problem is (poorly, counterproductively) solved, Republicans are faced with a bit of a problem: How do they keep justifying an agenda based entirely around debt fears now that the debt doesn't look so scary?

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• The usefulness of pie charts, in two pie charts (Mon, 17 Jun 2013 15:02:10 GMT)
  

  Walter Hickey at Business Insider launched an excellent attack against pie charts. But in case all those words are bogging you down, we have a helpful, simpler version of his piece to offer.

  And things get even more dramatic when you're talking about 3-D pie charts. As Hickey writes, "an angled 3D pie chart is an excellent way to lie to you."

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• READ: The Supreme Court rules against proof-of-citizenship requirements for voting (Mon, 17 Jun 2013 14:49:14 GMT)
  

  In Arizona et al. v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona, Inc., et al., the court ruled that the federal National Voter Registration Act of 1993 — or the "motor voter" act — trumps an Arizona law that "requires voter-registration officials to 'reject' any application for registration, including a Federal Form, that is not accompanied by documentary evidence of citizenship."

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• READ -- The Supreme Court rules lawyers can't use DMV records to find clients (Mon, 17 Jun 2013 14:39:08 GMT)
  

  In Maracich et al. v. Spears, a group of lawyers tried to use a state Freedom of Information Act request to get DMV records in order to find potential plaintiffs for a class action lawsuit against a number of car dealerships. The DMV acquiesced, the lawyers mass-mailed their potential clients, and the potential clients sued them, arguing this invaded their privacy.

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• READ: The Supreme Court rules that judges can't impose mandatory minimums on their own (Mon, 17 Jun 2013 14:32:32 GMT)
  

  In Alleyne v. United States, the court reverses their decision in the 2002 case Harris v. United States , and holds that judges cannot recommend or impose mandatory minimum sentences based on facts that had not been established by the jury in the case at hand. To do so, they ruled, violates the Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial.

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