Official Forecast

The Bush administration releases its latest forecast, and CEA Chair Eddie Lazear discusses it. A few excerpts from Eddie:

• "What we've seen over the past year is that real wages for non-supervisory and production workers have increased by 2.8 percent. And that -- when we're talking about production workers, hourly wages of production workers, this excludes the 20 percent of supervisory workers who tend to earn more. So when we're talking about 2.8 percent, we're talking about mainstream American workers....I would anticipate that we will have positive and strongly positive wage growth, real wage growth into next year, through next year."
• "we have heard calls by Congress for increases in the minimum wage, and my sense is that this is not necessarily inconsistent with the President's view on this, and that there is some room for us to work on something together going forward."
• "The President has come out very strongly opposed to any tax increase because he thinks it will harm the economy. That's consistent with my view as well. I think a tax increase at this point is both unnecessary and undesirable."