Yet critics of the H1B program say the visas put many foreign workers at a deep disadvantage. They tend to get paid less and cannot easily leave the companies that brought them to the United States unless they obtain green cards. In addition to proposed higher wages, the Senate plan seeks to protect U.S. workers by prohibiting U.S. companies from displacing Americans with foreign employees.

Is it conclusive? One response has been to argue that the causation is backwards, or that slower growth leads to higher debt-to-GDP ratios. Josh Bivens and John Irons made this case at the Economic Policy Institute. But this assumes that the data is correct. From the beginning there have been complaints that Reinhart and Rogoff weren’t releasing the data for their results (e.g. Dean Baker). I knew of several people trying to replicate the results who were bumping into walls left and right – it couldn’t be done.

Reinhart and Rogoff have always been careful to note that just because high-debt countries have tended to grow more slowly than low debt countries, it doesn’t mean that high-debt definitively caused slow growth. Critics have a pointed out, quite justifiably, that the causation could be the other way around — that slow growth causes debt

I spoke to Josh Bivens, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute in Washington who co-wrote one of the first critiques of the Reinhart-Rogoff paper in 2010. He said he wasn’t surprised by the UMass result: “There’s never a sound theoretical reason why there should be a threshold” at which debt suddenly becomes a serious problem—90 percent in the Reinhart-Rogoff paper.

Bivens also said it’s quite possible that rather than debt causing slow growth, in many cases it’s the other way around: Countries that are growing slowly tend to rack up lots of government debt. He said Reinhart and Rogoff in some of their nonacademic writings have ignored that possibility and asserted—without justification—that high debt does indeed harm growth.

A new report from the Economic Policy Institute outlines the discouraging news about 16.2 percent unemployment for Americans younger than 25, along with low wages and underemployment for both high school and college students in the class of 2013.

“Young workers always experience disproportionate increases in unemployment during downturns,” the report notes. “The Great Recession and its aftermath has been the longest, most severe period of economic weakness this country has experienced in more than seven decades.”

Only 88,000 new jobs were produced last month, and the only reason the unemployment rate ticked down to a still-alarming 7.6 percent is because so many people left the work force altogether, which sent the labor force participation rate down to 63.3 percent, the lowest point since 1979. If we were to include in the calculations those who have given up looking for work, the unemployment rate would actually be 9.8 percent.

Before I am deluged with angry comments, let me recognize that in recent years the one-for-one relationship between productivity and wages, especially median wages, has broken down. But that’s a subject for another day. (For those interested, Lawrence Mishel, of the Economic Policy Institute, has an informative survey article about it.)

Challenges to success stories: Chicago, New York, Washington – all three have been described as showing success under hard-charging leaders demanding better results. But leaders of an organization called a Broader, Bolder Approach to Education released test data and other information last week that challenged that story line, saying the rhetoric didn’t match the reality and that, in some ways, all three had accomplished little, or even done worse, than other cities. The group, associated with the union-leaning Economic Policy Institute, said places showing more success, including Cincinnati and Charlotte, N.C., emphasize “holistic” approaches to children and their needs, and not test-oriented approaches.

“People have no idea how important federal spending is,” said Rebecca Thiess of the Economic Policy Institute, a left-of-center think tank. “Education, the elderly, service to the disabled, firefighters. … It’s vastly important.”

Andrew Fieldhouse at The Fiscal Times put the nation’s upper economic echelons on notice last week by letting them know they’re not paying anything close to what economists feel is their fair share. 

Amid stifled economic output, stagnant job growth, sequestration cuts, the expired payroll tax cuts, the stonewalling of the American Jobs Act and the gradual replacement of stimulus with European-style austerity, Fieldhouse says a dollar of government spending cuts will do four to seven times as much economic damage than an additional dollar of revenue collected from upper-income taxpayers.

A separate analysis of government data, released by the Economic Policy Institute earlier this week, also found that unemployment rates for young college grads are much lower than for young high school graduates who are furthering their education. Still, both groups are facing higher rates of joblessness than before the economy soured in late 2007.

For the fifth year in a row, high unemployment rates and depressed wages await college grads, who are leaving campus, on average, with $26,000 in student loan debt, according to a new analysis by the Economic Policy Institute.

Many students go to college with the idea that “they will be able to get a high quality job to pay off their student debt, but that idea is broken at a time like this,” EPI economist and co-author of the report, Heidi Shierholz said.

Currently, the unemployment rate among young college grads is 8.8 percent. That’s down from 10.4 percent in 2010, but still much higher than the pre-recession level of 5.7 percent in 2007. To make matters worse, many of the college grads that do score full-time jobs are earning less than they would in a healthy job market. According to the EPI, college grads are earning about $3,200 less a year than they were in 2000. Their pay fell by 7.6 percent in the last six years alone.

Since 2007, there’s been a huge exodus of people from the labor force. In March, the number was 496,000. Perhaps two-thirds of the dropouts leave because they’re discouraged that they’ll ever find work, estimates Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank. (The remaining third reflects lifestyle choices and aging, including the retirement of baby boomers.) Counting many discouraged workers as jobless would raise the unemployment rate close to 10 percent instead of the reported 7.6 percent, she says.

The treatment of carried interest has for years been strongly defended by elements of the financial industry, and the White House proposal was quickly attacked on Wednesday by the leading private equity industry trade group. Even supporters of the proposal conceded that it faced stiff political opposition.

“Republicans are never going to sign off on this,” said Andrew Fieldhouse, an analyst at the Economic Policy Institute.

The president, CBPP, CAP, and a few Democrats on the Hill may back chained CPI, but many other liberal groups and leaders oppose it. On Tuesday, a group of major progressive organizations, including the National Organization for Women, the Campaign for America’s Future and MoveOn.org, joined Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Reps. Mark Takano (D-Calif.) and Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) for a protest on Capitol Hill opposing the proposed cuts. More than 2 million people signed a petition presented to the White House the same day opposing the plan. “We’re not going to balance the budget on the backs of elderly, disabled vets, the sick or the children,” Sanders later told Current TV .

“I’ve never seen such a wholehearted and rapid response,” says Monique Morrissey, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute, which opposes the cuts. She calls the CBPP and CAP the “two notable dissenters” that are “much more deficit-hawkish than the mainstream of the progressive movement.”

But the Advocacy study has also come under scrutiny from economists and legal scholars, who have challenged the methodology, the underlying data and the authors’ reluctance to share certain details about how they did their work. And while much of the criticism comes from liberal organizations like the Center for Progressive Reform and the Economic Policy Institute (which weighed in twice), here, too, the outrage is not strictly partisan: theCongressional Research Service has also cast doubt on the study’s findings.

Daniel Costa, immigration policy analyst at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, said the top 10 companies with the most H-1B visas last year were all firms that bring workers here to work at lower cost than Americans would, then send them back home. Many are technology companies based in India.

“There need to be some major reforms before expansion happens,” Costa said.

Shiller, John Irons and Josh Bivens, and Mike Konczal have also noted that’s it’s much more likely that causality runs in the other direction. That is, countries have high debt-to-GDP ratios because they have slow growth, rather than the other way around. This makes sense. Slow growth means lower tax revenue, greater social service payouts, and a whole lot of other factors that contribute to increased deficits and debt.

What angers advocates for the elderly and disabled and surprises economists is that there’s so little recognition that both the existing and proposed cost-of-living adjustments largely overlook the real prices for seniors and the disabled.

“It’s a backdoor benefit cut. It’s not a more accurate measure of the costs facing seniors,” said Monique Morrissey, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank. “If anything, the current (cost-of-living adjustment) underestimates inflation (faced by seniors).”

Think only teenagers earn the minimum wage? Analysis of minimum-wage workersshows that, at most, 20 percent are teenagers, about 50 percent are full-time employees and about 60 percent are women. The vast majority have household earnings below the median, which was$50,054 in 2011.

More grim news for university grads: The starting salaries of those who have recently earned college diplomas have stagnated — and even dropped — over recent years, a report says.

Between 2000 and 2012, the wages of fresh college grads dropped 8.5%, a roughly $3,200 decline for full-time workers. In the last six years alone, their pay fell 7.6%, according to a report from the Economic Policy Institute.

Unemployment remains high for young college grads. For those who will find jobs, many will probably have to settle for low-level positions, the Economic Policy Institute said Wednesday.

High school and college graduates are still being hobbled by years of weak economic growth and an extremely tight job market, and that difficult start in the job market could impact the class of 2013 for years to come, a new analysis finds.

“Graduating in a bad economy has long-lasting economic consequences,” said Heidi Shierholz, economist with the Economic Policy Institute, which prepared the report on young workers released Wednesday.

The liberal-leaning think tank looked at high school graduates between ages 17 and 20 who aren’t enrolled in further schooling, as well as college graduates between ages 21 and 24 who have a bachelor’s degree and aren’t seeking further education.

Other economists doubt that a skills mismatch is playing a significant role. Elise Gould, an economist at the liberal Economic Policy Institute, says there are more unemployed people than jobs in nearly every industry. That suggests that a broad slowdown in the economy is to blame for still-high unemployment, rather than a shortage of qualified workers in certain industries.

The NOW panel discusses the late night voting in the Senate on their first budget plan in four years and the wee hour amendments that got added in.