When the White House chief of staff, Jeffrey Zients, met with dozens of top executives in Washington this month, he encountered a familiar list of corporate complaints about President Biden. The executives at the Business Roundtable, a group representing some of the country’s biggest corporations, objected to Mr. Biden’s proposals to raise taxes. They questioned…
The $1.9 trillion economic stimulus package that President Biden signed shortly after taking office has become both an anchor and a buoy for his re-election campaign. The American Rescue Plan, which the Biden administration created and Democrats passed in March 2021, has fueled discontent among voters, in sometimes paradoxical ways. Some Americans blame the law,…
After years of organizing Amazon workers and pressuring the company to bargain over wages and working conditions, two prominent unions are teaming up to challenge the online retailer. The partnership was made final after members of the Amazon Labor Union, the only union formally representing Amazon warehouse workers in the United States, overwhelmingly chose to…
The United States is on a pace to add trillions of dollars to its national debt over the next decade, borrowing money more quickly than previously expected, at a time when big legislative fights loom over taxes and spending. The Congressional Budget Office said on Tuesday that the U.S. national debt is poised to top…
Home prices have held up better than expected amid high interest rates. But that doesn’t mean the housing market is healthy. When the Federal Reserve began raising interest rates in 2022, most economists thought the housing market would be the first to suffer the consequences: Higher borrowing costs would make it more expensive to buy…
Construction of new homes in the United States dropped below expectations in May as builders pull back on new residential projects largely in response to high interest rates, reinforcing concerns about stubbornly high housing prices. Government data released on Thursday showed that new-home construction, or housing starts, fell 5.5 percent last month to an annualized…
For years, liberal Democrats have agitated for the United States to tax wealth, not just income, as a way to ensure that rich Americans who derive wealth from real estate, stocks, bonds and other assets were paying more in taxes. On Thursday, that dream survived a Supreme Court scare, but just barely. Thanks to a…
A team of economists recently analyzed 20 years of peer-reviewed research on the social cost of carbon, an estimate of the damage from climate change. They concluded that the average cost, adjusted for improved methods, is substantially higher than even the U.S. government’s most up-to-date figure. That means greenhouse gas emissions, over time, will take…
A last-minute political compromise has headed off an effort to repeal a California law allowing workers to sue employers for workplace violations — a legal tool that has cost companies billions of dollars. The compromise, announced on Tuesday by Gov. Gavin Newsom, followed meetings with business leaders and the powerful California Labor Federation over ways…
A California labor regulator said on Tuesday that it had fined Amazon nearly $6 million for thousands of violations of a safety law that took effect in 2022. The measure, known as the Warehouse Quotas Law, lets employees request written explanations of any productivity quotas that apply to them, as well as explanations of any…
