Economy
May 20, 2013 — Steven Hayward
I’ve expressed my puzzlement and disappointment here before about how Apple, like so much of Silicon Valley, is reflexively liberal in its politics. So it is with some curiosity that I note the story out last week about how Apple CEO Tim Cook was trying to “get out ahead” on the story of his appearance before a Senate committee tomorrow in Washington where he will essentially be called unpatriotic—by both
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May 13, 2013 — John Hinderaker
Today the Minnesota Senate passed a bill authorizing gay marriage which will be signed into law by our governor, Mark Dayton. That is the context for this text, which my oldest daughter sent me a few minutes ago: If I had a dollar for every #time4marriage hashtag on my feed I’d be rich. Someone should start a #time4jobs trend, seeing as there are approx. twice as many unemployed Americans as
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May 9, 2013 — Steven Hayward
You may recall that back in the late 1980s, lots of certified smart people like James Fallows and Clyde Prestowitz were telling us that Japan was eating our lunch in terms of economic policy, because they had embraced the kind of government-led industrial policy that used to put a spring in Walter Mondale’s step. It was confidently predicted that at the present rate, Japan might well overtake the United States
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May 6, 2013 — Steven Hayward
“Dictatorships and Double Standards” is of course the title of Jeane Kirkpatrick’s famous Commentary article about how “human rights” liberals of the time were hard on our allies who had less than stellar human rights records, but supine in the face of totalitarians like the Soviet Union and its allies such as Cuba. (Because, as we all know, Cuba’s literacy and universal health care are more important than bourgeois rights
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April 13, 2013 — John Hinderaker
Any port in a storm: the Obama administration would rather talk about anything other than the economy. Understandably. So it’s one damn thing after another. Michael Ramirez notes the administration’s most recent preoccupation:
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April 9, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
I respect much of Grover Norquist’s work, but certain of his arguments in favor of comprehensive immigration reform are imbecilic. Consider his response to the concern that entitlement payments will skyrocket if such reform comes before the border is secure: The idea of treating people as a liability — that more people coming in might go on welfare — that’s an argument against having babies, that’s an argument for car
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April 5, 2013 — John Hinderaker
Senator Jeff Sessions released this statement about today’s disappointing jobs numbers: Today’s jobs report reveals that 90 million Americans are now outside the labor force. We need to be getting Americans back to work, helping people move off of food stamps and welfare, and find good jobs with steady incomes. But the comprehensive immigration bill being drafted right now would provide nearly immediate work authorization to millions of illegal immigrants
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April 5, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
The latest government jobs reports finds that only 88,000 jobs were added in March. That’s half of the 12 month average and less than half of what most experts expected. The unemployment rate actually declined slightly to 7.6 percent. This is the result of the decrease of folks looking for work. The labor-force participation rate dropped from 63.5 percent to dropped to 63.3 percent, its lowest point since 1978, according
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April 4, 2013 — John Hinderaker
President Obama ran as the candidate of hope and change, but his regime has been one of unemployment and poverty. How a president with such a record could be re-elected is a mystery that historians will try to unravel for many years to come, but in the meantime, Michael Ramirez comments on the shocking fact that nearly one in six Americans is now living in poverty, courtesy of Obamanomics. Our
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April 3, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
Under President Obama, the old normal unemployment rate in the former Western Europe — around 8 percent — seems to have become the new normal in the United States. I guess there’s at least poetic justice in this, since leading Democrats like Obama and John Kerry tend to see Western Europe as a model for the U.S. Unfortunately, though, the new normal unemployment rate in Europe is much higher than
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March 27, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
What is the key to a revival of the Republican Party? In a sense, the question is unfair because it assumes the Party is in need of revival even though it did fantastically well in 2010 and well enough at the state and U.S. House of Representatives level in 2012. Even at the presidential level, the Republican candidate did about as well as the Democrat did in 2004. And John
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March 20, 2013 — John Hinderaker
I can’t resist passing on this hilarious Michael Ramirez cartoon. All I can say is, don’t let it happen here!
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March 17, 2013 — John Hinderaker
Just about everyone expects the economy to crash, in some fashion, in the next few years. The fundamentals are very bad: year after year of virtually no growth; ever-declining labor force participation; grotesquely wasteful government spending; exploding federal debt; cronyism that saps vitality from our economy; and a largely dysfunctional education system. The questions are: 1) when will the crash happen? and 2) what form will it take? The last
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March 13, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
Based on the results of a Washington Post/ABC News poll, the Post concludes that President Obama is losing public trust when it comes to the economy. The numbers support that conclusion. They show Obama’s overall approval rating down by 5 points from just before his second term, to 50 percent. Of the seven post-World War II presidents who served a second term, only George W. Bush had a lower approval
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March 11, 2013 — John Hinderaker
There are a couple of topics on which I still intend to do substantial posts, but the one just below on the Second Amendment and sugary drinks burned up much of my evening. Not only that, the second episode of Vikings awaits on my iPad. The first episode wasn’t great, in my opinion, maybe 55 on a 100-point scale, but the Vikings are my forebears so I’m not giving up
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March 11, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
John Taylor is the Mary and Robert Raymond Professor of Economics at Stanford University, and the George P. Shultz Senior Fellow in Economics at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. During George W. Bush’s first term, he served as the Under Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs. Taylor is perhaps best known for developing the Taylor Rule, a recommendation about how nominal interest rates should be determined that became a rough
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March 10, 2013 — Steven Hayward
If there’s any establishment economist I dislike almost as much as the egregious Paul Krugman, it would be Jeffery Sachs of Columbia University. Sachs is smug, arrogant, condescending, and has his own list of Epic Fails to match Krugman’s (but no Nobel Prize). As our faithful reader RS points out to me often, it would be worth comparing the dreadful economic advice Sachs gave to Russia after the collapse of
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