In August 1982, after a year in a deep recession that had several months left to run, Congress passed the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act (TEFRA), scaling back the large Reagan tax cuts that had been enacted just over one year earlier as part of the Economic Recovery Tax Act (ERTA). Legislation over the same period cut near-term federal spending, with reductions in nondefense spending swamping additions to defense spending (Congressional Budget Office 1983, Table 8). Together, the spending reductions and TEFRA were estimated to have increased the fiscal-year 1983 primary surplus by $50 billion, or about 1.5 percent of GDP. During the next U.S. recession, in October 1990, a budget summit meeting of President Bush and Congressional leaders produced legislation aimed at reducing the cumulative deficit by $500 billion over five fiscal years, including $33 billion in fiscal-year 1991. The summit also produced the Budget Enforcement Act (BEA), introducing new budget rules aimed at controlling budget deficits and discretionary spending. As in the previous recession, budget deficits captured the attention of policy makers and strongly influenced their fiscal policy actions. As 2008 drew to a close one year into the most serious U.S. recession at least since 1982, Congress and the incoming Obama administration were moving toward adopting legislation of a

This paper examines whether middle age American households purchase adequate amounts of life insurance. The analysis is based on SRI International's 1980, 1982, and 1984 surveys of the financial positions of American households. Our findings indicate that a significant minority of American wives are highly underinsured with respect to the possible deaths of their husbands. We find that 25 to 30% of wives are inadequately insured, by which we mean that they would suffer a loss in their rate of sustainable consumption of at least 30% in the event of being widowed. These findings on inadequate life insurance are even more striking if one focuses on those households in which over half of the couple's present expected value of resources is dependent on the husband's survival. The results of this paper together with those of the related literature strongly suggest that raising the share of social security benefits that are paid to surviving spouses as well as increasing employer-provided group life insurance could have a very considerable impact on the alleviation of poverty among widows, especially elderly widows.

have provided us with a wealth of information about the newest products of U.S. Ph.D. programs. Among the notable facts are the continuing decline in the share of U.S. natives among these new graduates, their continued success at landing academic and other professional jobs, and their high level of professional fulfillment, in terms of both job satisfaction and outcomes measuring up to expectations. There are also a variety of intriguing results. For example, (from their table 5) students completing the top Ph.D. programs were younger, less likely to be married, and more likely to be foreign than those in the overall sample. Perhaps most disturbing, (from their table 6) median starting full-time academic salaries were lowest in public economics, a result that cannot be accounted for in salary regressions with other covariates. This clearly is an inversion of the appropriate ranking. In my comments, I will focus on two selected aspects of Ph.D. programs and the Ph.D. job market.