Economy
Ed Driscoll rounds up a little bit of the commentary, including: TWITTER THREAD ON 2020 AND ITS AFTERMATH: “The Democrats saw an opportunity with the emergence of Covid to crush a roaring economy under a president they didn’t like. So they, & their base, did everything in their power to impose crushing restrictions on small…
Not long ago, technology was beginning to allow the blind to see. Beware the need for maintenance and software support: These three patients, and more than 350 other blind people around the world with Second Sight’s implants in their eyes, find themselves in a world in which the technology that transformed their lives is just…
Author and former Providence Journal opinion page editor Ed Achorn has been tweeting about the Canadian government’s move on banking, and the topic is one that ought to be of much more concern to all of us. Note this tweet, from Peter Sweden, which Achorn passes along with the comment, “If true, this is terrifying”: In Canada…
If you’re only a casual observer of legislation and/or labor law, you might find news coverage of Rhode Island labor unions’ study on “wage theft” confusing. The study is about misclassification of workers as independent contractors, yet the rhetoric is about “wage theft.” Are those the same thing? It’s an important question, because the push…
Patrick Tyrrell and Anthony Kim summarize a recent study of the effect of enhanced unemployment on the job market: If common sense and reports from thousands of employers weren’t enough, a recent National Bureau of Economic Research paper found conclusively that paying people not to work during the COVID-19 pandemic was why many of them…
Policy decisions can obviously increase or decrease the amount of poverty in a society. Socialism, for example, is absolutely devastating and has repeatedly proven to result in misery and starvation. That said, the following pair of tweets from Atlantic writer Clint Smith gets reality precisely backwards, and in a way that is important for everybody…
Writing for J&S Transportation, Travis Van Slooten tries to understand why Americans have moved during the pandemic. To start with, though, we should probably think about why they have not: A lot of attention has been focused on how the COVID-19 pandemic affected moving trends in the U.S. While some use terms like exodus when…
The American Action Forum draws our attention to the massive increase in the cost of regulations Americans have experienced over the past year, mostly going into effect this month: With more than $201 billion in costs, the Biden era to-date far outpaces its predecessors, with more than three times the costs of Obama’s first year and…
Brad Polumbo conveys a should-be-unsurprising finding from an MIT study: The federal government has spent an astounding $42,000 per federal taxpayer on so-called “stimulus” efforts since the pandemic began. Where did all that money go? Well, as it turns out, one of the biggest stimulus programs, the Paycheck Protection Program, failed miserably. … The analysis…
I’ll be honest. Facing a massive imminent bill for a prematurely failed septic system while I’m in the midst of a career adjustment and at a high-water mark for higher-education expenses spanning generations, news about a state-administered federal program to hand out up to $50,000 to homeowners initially felt like an opportunity: The newly opened…