Economy
December 16, 2012 — John Hinderaker
Via InstaPundit, we learn that for the first time, the United States does not rank as one of the world’s ten most prosperous nations, as rated by London’s Legatum Institute. The authors of the report found that the U.S.’s slippage is being driven by “a decline in the number of US citizens who believe that hard work will get them ahead.” Well, they’re right: in Barack Obama’s America, hard work
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December 15, 2012 — Paul Mirengoff
What should we make of Ben Bernanke’s historic decision to link interest rates to an unemployment target? I take a negative view, but that’s just a reaction, not an analysis. Let’s turn the floor over to two experts, James Pethokoukis, who favors the move, and King Banaian, who doesn’t. First, Pethokoukis: Let’s look at the economy right now and identity what its biggest problems are. GDP growth will likely come
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December 13, 2012 — John Hinderaker
Small business owners are more pessimistic than at almost any time in modern history following last month’s election, according to the National Federation of Independent Business: The most significant factor impacting the decline in optimism is the expectation that future business conditions will be worse than current ones. The net percent of owners expecting better business conditions in six months fell 37 points to a net negative 35 percent. In
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December 12, 2012 — Paul Mirengoff
President Obama’s goal in the fiscal cliff negotiations seems clear. He wants to force the Republicans to swallow increases in the tax rates of high-earners and thereby bring in at least one trillion dollars in revenue. Alternatively, if the Republicans won’t swallow rate increases for the “wealthy,” he wants to see everyone’s taxes go up and be able to blame Republicans for it. The Republican goal also seems clear. They
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December 8, 2012 — Paul Mirengoff
President Obama said in his radio address today that going over the so-called financial cliff “would be bad for families, it would be bad for businesses, and it would drag down our entire economy.” “Bad all around,” as Sam Spade would say. Most people understand this. The question is, how far will Obama go to avoid “the cliff.” On this question, Obama said that he will not sign a package
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December 7, 2012 — Paul Mirengoff
Superficially, the November jobs report doesn’t look bad. Non-farm jubs increased by almost 150,000 and the unemployment rate dropped to a four year low of 7.7 percent. Viewed with a little more sophistication, the report looks worse. 150,000 new jobs isn’t very impressive. And the drop in the unemployment rate stems from the large number of Americans who stopped looking for work. In fact, the deeper one drills down, the
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December 7, 2012 — Steven Hayward
Ronald Coase, the University of Chicago economist, Nobel Prize winner, and originator of the widely used and misused “Coase Theorem” (about the dynamics of property rights) is still going at the ripe young age of 102. I believe his famous essay, “The Problem of Social Cost,” remains the most-cited law review article in history, and it spawned the influential law and economics movement inside the legal academy. Writing recently in the Harvard
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December 7, 2012 — Steven Hayward
That’s the title of a fine column from John Agresto that appeared in the Washington Examiner on Wednesday, making a more succinct case for the same point I’ve tried to make in my two previous posts on why Republicans are losing the tax debate, here and here. While I focused on the lack of an argument about justice for fairness, Agresto takes dead aim at the view that might be
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December 4, 2012 — Paul Mirengoff
Each of the following 20 propositions are, I think, true: 1. Either there will be a deal between President Obama and the Republicans or there will be no deal and we will go over the “fiscal cliff.” This choice can be postponed until next year, but it probably can’t be avoided altogether. 2. In all likelihood, Obama won’t agree to a deal unless the tax rates of very top earners
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November 29, 2012 — Paul Mirengoff
Tim Geithner presented John Boehner with the Obama plan for averting the “fiscal cliff.” According to the New York Times, Obama’s plan calls for $1.6 trillion in tax increases over 10 years, $50 billion in immediate stimulus spending, home mortgage refinancing, and a permanent end to Congressional control over statutory borrowing limits. President Obama would also agree to a goal of finding $400 billion in savings from Medicare and other
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November 28, 2012 — Paul Mirengoff
We’ve written, as has virtually every other commentator, about the “fiscal cliff.” But the term is probably a misnomer. It refers to the fact that, absent a budget deficit deal, taxes will rise on everyone who pays them and federal spending will be cut. The combined effect would be a small but discernible change in fiscal policy that might well slow the economy down or, given how slow the economy
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November 27, 2012 — Paul Mirengoff
James Capretta offers four guidelines for navigating fiscal cliff negotiations. On the whole, I think they are sensible suggestions and, at a minimum, worthy of consideration. First, “acknowledge the economic and policy risks of going over the cliff.” It’s possible that the looming tax increases and spending cuts wouldn’t send the U.S. economy into a recession. It’s also possible that massive cuts to the military budget wooudn’t produce adverse consequences
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November 25, 2012 — Steven Hayward
The current issue of The New Republic has a long attack on Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and free market economics generally by the Nobel laureate economist Robert Solow, entitled “Hayek, Friedman, and the Illusions of Conservative Economics.” Ostensibly a review of the brand new book The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets Since the Great Depression by Angus Burgin, the review is less about the book than it is an excuse
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November 22, 2012 — Steven Hayward
If you follow the news you’ve no doubt heard of the Higgs boson (named for physicist Peter Higgs), the mysterious subatomic particle that helps explain the Big Bang and the “standard model” of the universe. But there is another important Higgs hypothesis that you should know about—named for economist and historian Robert Higgs—that explains the big bang of endless expansion of modern government. In his pathbreaking 1988 book Crisis and
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November 20, 2012 — Steven Hayward
While everyone has his gaze fixed on the “fiscal cliff,” Paul drew our attention this morning to the fact that France is already mid-air after leaping of their version of the fiscal cliff. And that’s only the beginning. The can of European fiscal woes has been kicked so hard and so far down the road that they’re having to borrow new cans to kick from central bank recycling bins. How
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November 15, 2012 — Steven Hayward
If you’ve never read Leonard Read’s classic essay “I, Pencil,” about how the manufacture of a simple (yet not so simple) pencil is coordinated by the marketplace rather than by a central planner, you’ve missed a treat. Last fall I had frequent installments here drawn from the wisdom of F.A. Hayek, and “I, Pencil” is an inverse illustration of the problem of economic coordination that Hayek spent so much of
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November 14, 2012 — Paul Mirengoff
President Obama ran for re-election advocating a “balanced approach” to dealing with our fiscal crisis. Now, our own John Hinderaker has proposed one — raise everyone’s taxes by letting the Bush-era tax cuts expire. You can’t get much more balanced than that. However, I don’t favor raising anyone’s taxes within the current tax code structure, and I don’t think, as a political matter, that Republicans should push for an across-the-board
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