There is no mystery about Barack Obama’s greatest presidential achievement: He stopped the Great Recession from becoming the second Great Depression. True, he had plenty of help, including from his predecessor, George W. Bush, and from the top officials at the Treasury and Federal Reserve. But if Obama had made one wrong step, what was a crushing economic slump …

  The unemployment rate is down to 4.6 percent, which sounds pretty good. But the unemployment rate doesn’t count people who’ve given up looking for jobs, which is why the employment-to-population ratio, especially the “prime-age” ratio for those 25 through 54, may be a better measure of the health of the labour market. After I wrote about this metric, several …

  If only congressional Republicans were as confident in their ideas for replacing Obamacare as they are in their plans to repeal it. Then maybe the quick strike against the law that they have scheduled for the new year would be accompanied by a constructive debate about the vast yet troubled federal program that tens of millions of Americans have …