Economy
February 20, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
The Washington Post reports that, as the sequester approaches, our politicians are focused not on dealing with it, but on attempting to blame ther opponents. No suprise there. In analyzing the politics of sequestration, it might be useful to separate two sets of consequences for which blame may attach. In the short term, politicians from one or both parties may be blamed for the inconveniences associated with cuts in government
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February 19, 2013 — John Hinderaker
The gulf between Barack Obama and reality continues to grow, but Barry remains a legend in his own mind. Michael Ramirez brilliantly weaves together Obama’s penchant for vacations and his second-favorite sport with his appalling record when he is ostensibly working:
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February 19, 2013 — John Hinderaker
John Cochrane of the University of Chicago and Stanford said it succinctly: Once upon a time, the minimum wage, like free trade, was a basic test of whether you were awake in the first week of econ 1. We put a horizontal line in a supply and demand graph. Minimum wages increase unemployment of poor people. Yes, that fact was once considered so obvious that, if I recall correctly, both
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February 16, 2013 — Scott Johnson
Megan McArdle makes this point in the context of the minimum wage, but it is one that I have tried to make a couple of times in the context of Obama’s many and varied employment-suppressing policies generally: The thing about unemployment is that it’s much, much worse than having a crap low-wage job. It’s worse than almost anything. It’s one of those life events that people never really recover from.
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February 11, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
It’s a curious fact of the Obama presidency that the American people basically tuned him out during much of his first term. Despite his stellar communications skills, Obama was unable to convince Americans to support his signature program — Obamacare — and none of his prior state of the union speeches seems to have moved the needle. We also know that the president’s utterances on behalf of Democrats in 2010
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February 6, 2013 — John Hinderaker
Everyone knows that the U.S. is experiencing a boom in oil and gas production, but that boom is limited to private lands and, to a lesser extent, state lands, since the Obama administration continues to block energy development on federally-owned lands. How badly is the Obama administration hurting our economy by suppressing energy development wherever it can? The Institute for Energy Research commissioned Prof. Joseph Mason of LSU to estimate
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February 5, 2013 — John Hinderaker
Scott noted earlier today that the currency war is underway, with countries around the world debasing their money to disguise the fact that they can’t control their spending. While the phenomenon is becoming worldwide, some countries are ahead of others. Like Argentina. ZeroHedge comments on Argentina’s utterly pathetic decision to freeze supermarket prices: Up until now, Argentina’s descent into a hyperinflationary basket case, with a crashing currency and loss of
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February 5, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
Throughout the “fiscal cliff” drama, I argued that once the middle class tax increase was called off (as seemed almost inevitable), Republicans would have the upper hand because President Obama fears sequestration more than Republicans do (or should). The key, then, was to keep sequestration on the table or, as I put it, “to go over half of the fiscal cliff.” Now that we are about to take that plunge,
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January 30, 2013 — John Hinderaker
With this morning’s announcement that the economy shrank by 0.1% in the 4th quarter of 2012–unexpectedly!–the specter of another recession looms. The Associated Press doesn’t try to sugarcoat the news; it terms the decline a “stunning drop.” What to do, now that the worst recovery in history seems to have ground to a halt and the economy is slipping into reverse? Anything that might actually help is anathema to the
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January 23, 2013 — John Hinderaker
The Associated Press has undertaken an ambitious series of reports on the rotten U.S. and global economies. To its credit, the AP recognizes that our current recovery is, by any historical standard, awful: In the U.S., the economic recovery that started in June 2009 has been called the third straight “jobless recovery.” But that’s a misnomer. The jobs came back after the first two. Most recessions since World War II
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January 18, 2013 — Scott Johnson
At the top of chapter 1 of The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order, Steve Hayward observes: “The year 1964 was the Year of Lyndon.” In one of his great philosophical statements of 1964, LBJ gave us the liberal credo: “And I just want to tell you this: we’re in favor of a lot of things and we’re against mighty few.” It’s the liberal counterpart to
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January 12, 2013 — Steven Hayward
I’m late in offering notice of the passing on Wednesday of James Buchanan, who won the Nobel Prize in economics for his development of public choice theory. I was fortunate to meet Buchanan on a couple of occasions (usually Mont Pelerin Society meetings overseas), and long profited from deploying public choice analysis of nanny state madness. Public choice theory can be summarized in a number of fairly simple ways, such
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January 4, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
Now that the election is over, most of us don’t wait quite as breathlessly for the monthly job reports; nor is the media’s urge to spin them quite as strong. But the reports remain consequential and the temptation to spin remains strong. Today’s report shows that employers added 155,000 jobs in December 2012. The unemployment rate for December was 7.8 percent, unchanged from November (the November rate originally was 7.7
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December 28, 2012 — Paul Mirengoff
Ezra Klein is a self-styled “wonk blogger” for the Washington Post. His work does, indeed, have a wonkish quality. But if you strip that veneer away, he’s just another liberal columnist who writes intellectually dishonest pieces intended to show that Republicans are intellectually dishonest. In other words, E.J. Dionne with a calculator or Dana Milbank with a smaller smirk. Consider the recent column in which Klein argues that conservatives aren’t
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December 23, 2012 — John Hinderaker
Most people think that Barack Obama is winning his argument with John Boehner. That is probably true, since Boehner has barely engaged in public debate, preferring to pursue the fool’s game of secret negotiations. The same thing is happening around the world, as demagogic politicians lie to voters, assuring them that the status quo is sustainable. Just vote for more government, and the money will magically appear. Somehow. American voters
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December 21, 2012 — Paul Mirengoff
The Commerce Department has upwardly revised third-quarter real GDP to 3.1 percent. Previously, third-quarter growth was reported as 2.7 percent. With this revision, the third quarter of 2012 becomes the strongest quarter of the year and the third strongest since the economy began picking up in the summer of 2009. As James Pethokoukis suggests, the increasing strength of the economy during this summer likely played a significant role in President
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December 17, 2012 — Scott Johnson
Over the weekend Paul Mirengoff spotlighted the views of two well-informed commentators on the Fed’s long-running experiment in epic monetary easing, now in its fourth iteration. Paul is admirably open-minded, while admittedly suspicious, of the program. I frankly hate it. It robs savers of the value of their savings. It viciously complicates retirement planning and life for those in retirement. If a Republican were president, we’d be hearing about it
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