The University of Massachusetts Amherst
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Friedman

Friedman foresees fiasco from fiscal federalism

Professor Gerald Friedman
Professor Gerald Friedman
In this month’s Dollars and Sense, UMass Professor of Economics Gerald Friedman offers a clear, chilling, and historically informed assessment of how the Crisis of 2008 will continue into 2010 and beyond as the States, hobbled by limited fiscal capacity, will be forced to cut jobs and public services.

The Economic Crisis in the States — By Gerald Friedman — Dollars and Sense: Real World Economics

… without serious action, a sharp drop in government employment, with a loss of a million jobs or more, is what we can expect over the next year. This has implications for the economy as a whole and also for the well-being of large parts of the American public who depend on state and local government services. Two intrinsic features of the American system of government come together to threaten a social disaster: the limited capacity of state and local governments to spend beyond their immediate revenues even in the harshest economic crises, and our peculiar federal system in which education and social services are largely funded by local and state authorities rather than by the federal government, with its deep pockets and ability to spend beyond its revenues as needed to maintain existing services….

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Badgett Basu

Badgett and Basu: UMass Economists in the Blogs

Google Alerts today highlights the public impact of research by two UMass Economists:

Lee Badgett
Lee Badgett
Papers by UMass Economist Lee Badgett with law faculty co-authors R. Bradley Sears (UCLA) and Suzanne Goldberg (Rutgers) form the basis of the answers to “Questions about Same-Sex Marriage” on the GayBoomers (news for the middleaged queer and more) blog.

Deepankar Basu
Deepankar Basu
A working paper by Deepankar Basu, the newest addition to the UMass Economics Department, provides an “Analysis of Classes in India: A Preliminary Note on the Industrial Bourgeoisie and Middle Class.” An excerpt appears on the influential blog Sanhati: Fighting Neoliberalism in Bengal and Beyond. The paper also earns favorable mention on the Epoliticus blog.