Those lazy, hazy, crazy days of Paul and Jeb

Paul Krugman just knows that evil lurks in the hearts of the Bush family;

There’s now an effective consensus among Democrats — on display in Hillary Clinton’s planned Monday speech on the economy — that workers need more help, in the form of guaranteed health insurance, higher minimum wages, enhanced bargaining power, and more. Republicans, however, believe that American workers just aren’t trying hard enough to improve their situation, and that the way to change that is to strip away the safety net while cutting taxes on wealthy “job creators.”

And while Jeb Bush may sometimes sound like a moderate, he’s very much in line with the party consensus. If he makes it to the White House, the laziness dogma will rule public policy.

Well, we just happen to have some inconvenient facts for Professor Krugman (thanks to the irrepressible Jim Glass, commenting at The Money Illusion) that seem to indicate the Jeb Bush might be on to something that's true. The Boston Fed not only finds that leisure time has increased in America, it has increased disproportionally for the less educated.

In 1965 leisure was more or less equally distributed across all educational levels and working classes. However, by 2003 that was no longer true.

...the least-educated households experienced the largest gains in leisure, this growing "inequality" in leisure is the mirror image of the well-documented trends in income and expenditure inequality. The fact that the least-educated experience the most leisure posed an empirical puzzle for the standard [economic] model that relies solely on income and substitution effects: The time-series evidence suggests that rising incomes induce greater leisure, , while the recent cross-sections suggest that higher incomes are associated with lower levels of leisure.

So Paul Krugman, whaddya got to say about that?