Economy
Arthur Laffer think’s its prima facie absurd to think that extending unemployment benefits could reduce unemployment: No one opposes unemployment benefits as a transition aid for people to get back on their feet and find a new job. Unemployment benefits are a safeguard for individuals down on their luck. But to argue that unemployment benefits…
Jeffrey Friedman’s analysis of the origins of our current economic crisis and assessments thereof is worth reading, but he wraps it in the pose that everybody else is wrong: To their credit, liberal analysts realized from the start that the cause of the recession was a banking crisis, not a housing crisis. In explaining the…
Funny, I hadn’t heard insufficient involvement of “disadvantaged groups” included among the contributing factors to our the economic crisis that supposedly necessitates a stronger government hand in the finance industry. And yet: Chris Dodd, Barney Frank, and Barack Obama insist that the new financial regulation bill pending a vote in the Senate is a necessity…
Here’s a reminder of why things have to change dramatically in Rhode Island: Among the states, Rhode Island’s [unemployment] rate of 12.3 percent was the highest in the region and the fourth highest in the U.S. Since May 2009, Rhode Island’s rate was up 2.1 percentage points and was among 12 states nationally that recorded…
Predictive economic news has been dire, lately. If the dark notes weren’t so broadly being sounded, one might suspect a Republican conspiracy to keep a nascent recovery from helping the Democrats. The alternative explanation is that conservatives have been correct in their concerns about the Democrats’ method of “stimulating” the economy and that the consequences…
It appears that many residents’ car tax bills will offer an early illustration of the consequence of the big-spending stimulus pursued by Congress and the White House: A number of cars, which normally lose value each passing year, have increased in value this year as a result of several economic forces hitting the used car…
The behavior of both sides of the liberal-guilt–welfare axis might find some explanation in this line, drawn from a review of Arthur Brooks’s The Battle: How the Fight Between Free Enterprise and Big Government Will Shape America’s Future by Matthew Continetti (subscription required): It is not inequality, Brooks writes, that makes people unhappy. It is…
Marc Doughty of Pawtucket [H/T the “RISC-Y Business Daily Newsletter” – sign up here] has done the math that I had been meaning to get to: At the bottom of the June 15 article (“Stimulus-funded jobs appearing”) are numbers that should truly frighten anyone who still believes that the government is equipped to put the…
I’ve written, periodically, about my belief that debt is the new method of indentured servitude. If we can get young adults to enter the working world with hundreds of thousands of dollars in education loans, some additional thousands in credit card debt (incurred on the expectation of profitable labor after graduation), with car loans a…
This short article about job prospects for young adults in Greece catches many of the various nuances, but it still seems as if there’s a disconnect of cause and effect. Consider: From their settled perches, the elders criticize and cluck. The young, they say, have either no initiative, a dearth of opportunities, or some combination…