Raising the minimum wage, as President Obama proposed in his State of the Union address, tends to be more popular with the general public than with economists.

What I desire to point out is that I wish the law was not so, but that being the law, I must follow it.

Making labor less expensive helps firms hire people.

You care about the deficit because it allows you to do things you need to do to help people who are suffering.

Tax increases appear to have a very large sustained and highly significant negative impact on output. Since most of our exogenous tax changes are in fact reductions, the more intuitive way to express this result is that tax cuts have very large and persistent positive output effects

A natural way that an economist approaches a problem is to say, here's where I think the economy is going; this is what we need to deal with the problem.

I think something that forces financial institutions to write down underwater mortgages, I think, would be a sensible thing to do.