F.A.A. Says Air Traffic Staffing Is Returning to Normal

The back and forth followed the approval of legislation in Congress on Friday to relieve the nation’s air traffic control system from the effects of across-the-board spending cuts. The furloughs for air traffic controllers were among the most visible consequences of the cuts, leading to widespread flight delays.

The F.A.A. said it expected the nation’s air traffic control system to be back to normal by Sunday evening. But in a reflection of the lingering partisan divide over the cuts known as sequestration, neither Mr. Obama nor Congressional Republicans moved closer to a consensus on how to minimize the broader impact.

“This week, the sequester hurt travelers, who were stuck for hours in airports and on planes, and rightly frustrated by it,” Mr. Obama said in his weekly radio and Internet address taped in advance and broadcast on Saturday. “Maybe because they fly home each weekend, the members of Congress who insisted these cuts take hold finally realized that they actually apply to them, too.”

In the Republican response, Representative Bill Shuster of Pennsylvania, chairman of the House Transportation Committee, asked why there were furloughs. “Because,” he said, “there are some in the Obama administration who thought inflicting pain on the public would give the president more leverage to avoid making necessary spending cuts and to impose more tax hikes on the American people.”

The measure approved by Congress in response to the flight delays would give the transportation secretary flexibility to shift as much as $253 million to the air traffic control system and return staffing to full strength.

The money will come from airport improvement funds, and officials said they expected it would be enough to allow the F.A.A. to operate the air traffic control system at full strength through Sept. 30, the end of this fiscal year.

It's the Economy: What Will the Economy’s New ‘Normal’ Look Like in 2013?

Despite a worse-than-expected holiday season, the Federal Reserve forecast that G.D.P. growth would approach the historic average of about 3 percent in 2013. The economy may be coming back, but the question for many businesses is what the new “normal” looks like. Will shoppers spend as they did in the credit-bubble years? Or has the Great Recession scared them into prolonged stinginess? Early evidence suggests a mix. What is clear is that the big changes are just beginning.

Waste More, Want More

From the 1970s through the 1990s, the dominant retail trend was toward cheap and big: shoppers drove long distances to buy large boxes of everything they needed in bulk. Starting in the last decade, though, this began to change. And the success of products like Tide Pods (premeasured balls of detergent that made Procter & Gamble an estimated $500 million last year) suggest that the era of premium conveniences isn’t going anywhere.

Somewhat counterintuitively, this trend is directly related to the downturn, says John N. Frank, an analyst at Mintel, a market-research firm. Fearful of losing their jobs, millions of workers coped with the crisis by putting in more time at the office — “doing at least two people’s jobs,” Frank says — even if it meant less time to shop for deals. Dollar General saw tremendous growth as a more convenient alternative to Sam’s Club. Duane Reade, now owned by Walgreen, is proving that no block in Manhattan should be without a drugstore that also carries basic grocery items at an upcharge. Frank says he expects that anxious, overtired workers will drive this trend well into this decade, too.

Housing Is Back

Now that at least one million households are looking to move somewhere better, investors are looking to buy houses on the cheap — not to flip, but to rent. (The Blackstone Group, the private-equity colossus, has spent more than $1 billion this year buying up thousands of single-family homes around the country.) New residential construction starts also came back strong last year, and much of the growth was from multiunit apartment buildings designed, yes, for renting.

Despite the fact that homeownership has been promoted as a universal economic good since the Depression, the trend toward rentals might be a good one. Renters are more able to follow the job market. Renting, as the housing bubble revealed, benefits the overall recovery, because fewer people have their money tied up in one asset.

Not Your Father’s Oldsmobile

In 2012, the average life of a car in the United States reached a historic high of 11.2 years. This was tied to the collapse of new-car sales during the recession, but it was also driven by several long-term shifts. After steady increases for decades, Americans are driving less. Total miles driven in the United States hit 3 trillion for the first time in 2006. It went up even further in 2007 but has generally fallen since.

For the first time in nine decades, according to census data, walkable cities are growing faster than suburbs. And wherever people happen to move, they are buying smaller, more fuel-efficient cars. Large- and some luxury-car segments are falling, says Tom Libby, an automotive research analyst at Polk, and the cheaper subcompact and emerging sub-subcompact classes are growing. All this means that autos — one of the biggest industries in the United States — will not soon regain the explosive growth of the early 2000s.

Debt and Taxes

In 2008, Americans owed a collective $12.7 trillion. Today, thanks in part to mortgage defaults, we are down to $11.3 trillion, which is about 95 percent of our disposable income. That’s progress, but it’s still higher than the 88 percent we owed 10 years ago.

Additional reporting by Jacob Goldstein

Adam Davidson is co-founder of NPR’s “Planet Money,” a podcast and blog.