Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Wednesday, April 21, 2010

2 Unemployment thoughts

By Dave Anderson:

The first from the San Fransisco Federal Reserve on the impact of added weeks of benefits on the unemployment rate.  It is minimal: [h/t Econbrowser]

Although economists have shown that extended availability of UI benefits
will increase unemployment duration, the effect in the latest downturn
appears quite small compared with other determinants of the unemployment
rate. Our analyses suggest that extended UI benefits account for about
0.4 percentage point of the nearly 6 percentage point increase in the
national unemployment rate over the past few years. It is not surprising
that the disincentive effects of UI would loom small in the midst of
the most severe labor market downturn since the Great Depression.

Some conservative economists have argued that unemployment insurance swamps the lack of job availability in this current labor market and that is the reason why unemployment is 9.7% on U-3.  The lucky duckies are being coddled.  

And now a graph from the Center on Budget Policy and Priorities on the spike of long term unemployment:

Unemployment_scaled

Speaking as someone who is in part of this lucky 44% of long term unemployed, there is jack-shit out there. 



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