What does the federal government spend your tax dollars on? Social insurance programs, mostly
From Social Security to national parks, a look at long-range trends in federal outlays relative to the U.S. economy
Data Labs
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Federal criminal prosecutions fall to lowest level in nearly two decades
Federal prosecutors filed criminal charges against 77,152 defendants in fiscal year 2016. That’s a decline of 25% since fiscal 2011.
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Access to paid family leave varies widely across employers, industries
Americans generally support paid family and medical leave, according to a new Pew Research Center survey, but relatively few workers have access to it. Access to paid leave varies considerably by industry, type of employer and employer’s size.
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What backgrounds do U.S. Supreme Court justices have?
When President Donald Trump nominated federal appeals court judge Neil Gorsuch to fill the Supreme Court seat left vacant by the death last year of Justice Antonin Scalia, he chose a candidate whose professional background is very much in line with previous and current justices.
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The fading of the green: Fewer Americans identify as Irish
The ranks of Americans who trace their ancestry back to Ireland – long one of the most prominent subgroups in American society – are slowly declining.
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Immigrants don’t make up a majority of workers in any U.S. industry
Immigrants made up 17.2% of the total U.S. workforce in 2014, or about 27 million workers. Private households were the biggest immigrant-employing “industry,” followed by textile, apparel and leather manufacturers and the farm sector.
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What the unemployment rate does – and doesn’t – say about the economy
Although the unemployment rate gets most of the attention, the government’s monthly jobs report contains lots of other data that, properly interpreted, can provide a fuller picture of the U.S. economy.
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Q&A with Solomon Messing of Pew Research Center’s Data Labs
A conversation with the director of the Center’s Data Labs team on their new report on congressional communications and the uses and misuses of “big data.”
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Partisan Conflict and Congressional Outreach
A new analysis of more than 200,000 press releases and Facebook posts from the official accounts of members of the 114th Congress uses methods from the emerging field of computational social science to quantify how often legislators themselves “go negative” in their outreach to the public.
