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Megan McArdle

Megan McArdle - Megan McArdle is a senior editor for The Atlantic who writes about business and economics. She has worked at three start-ups, a consulting firm, an investment bank, a disaster recovery firm at Ground Zero, and The Economist. She is currently on leave.
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Megan was born and raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and yes, she does enjoy her lattes, as well as the occasional extra-dry skim-milk cappuccino. Her checkered work history includes three start-ups, four years as a technology project manager for a boutique consulting firm, a summer as an associate at an investment bank, and a year spent as sort of an executive copy girl for one of the disaster-recovery firms at Ground Zero � all before the age of 30.

While working at Ground Zero, Megan started Live From the WTC, a blog focused on economics, business, and cooking. She may or may not have been the first major economics blogger, depending on whether we are allowed to throw outlying variables such as Brad Delong out of the set. From there it was but a few steps down the slippery slope to freelance journalism. She has worked in various capacities for The Economist, where she wrote about economics and oversaw the founding of Free Exchange, the magazine's economics blog. She has also maintained her own blog, Asymmetrical Information, which moved to The Atlantic, along with its owner, in August 2007.

Megan holds a bachelor's degree in English literature from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago. After a lifetime as a New Yorker, she now resides in northwest Washington, D.C., where she is still trying to figure out what one does with an apartment larger than 400 square feet.
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Good News/Bad News on the Budget

By Megan McArdle

Aug 21 2009, 12:12 PM ET Comment

Well, I was wrong that the news on the budget would be worse than projected, but right that the Obama administration wasn't delaying its first mid-session budget review in order to hide the bad news in the August doldrums.  The budget deficit is going to be $1.6 trillion, instead of $1.8 trillion.

The good news is, we've spent considerably less on bailouts than we expected to, and slightly less on other programs.  The bad news is, revenue was $83 billion less than expected.  The revenue declines tend to lag the recession, so we'll be in that boat for a while.    The bailout money, on the other hand, is a one-year savings.

Still, it's hard to be unhappy about a $200 billion decline in the government.  $1.6 trillion to go . . .


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