Economy
Filling in for Dan Yorke, on Friday, Channel 10 reporter Gene Valicenti (another transplanted Jersey boy, by the way) took up the question of whether people feel it’s appropriate to boycott BP gas stations as a means of punishing the company for the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Inasmuch as I was busy…
In response to the Providence City Council’s useless declaration condemning Arizona’s controversial immigration law, Domenick Fabrizio, of Cumberland, has a suggestion: Since this city council wants to use economics to punish Arizona, my wife and I have decided to draw an economic line in the sand. We’ve decided to boycott organizations in Providence that we…
Not to kick off a beautiful Tuesday with gloom, but it seems inescapable. Environmental catastrophes, lingering war, emboldened terrorist states, and shifting demographics in the West that give those terrorist states reason for optimism about the future would each be bad enough, but the economy is what brings the world’s problems to the front doors…
… at best it borrows them, and while I certainly hope I’m wrong, I’m concerned that we’re just not going to experience significant job growth for the foreseeable future: A burst of government hiring of temporary census workers pushed the nation’s unemployment rate down a fraction in May, but private-sector employers added a mere 41,000…
Monty Perelin at American Thinker observes Wait, stop the Economics. There has been a terrible mistake. From the timeline of the “Maynard Keynes” website. [H/T Jill Fallon at Estate Vaults.] Over lunch at the Bank of England [in April, 1946], Keynes tells Henry Clay of his hopes that Adams Smith’s “invisible hand” can help Britain…
USA Today reports that recent number from the Bureau of Economic Analysis confirm what many people have sensed: private wages are shrinking while government grows. The facts: * Private wages. A record-low 41.9% of the nation’s personal income came from private wages and salaries in the first quarter, down from 44.6% when the recession began…
The financial regulation legislation — which has passed both houses and is awaiting reconciliation — hasn’t raised the ire that healthcare did before it. Several factors come play into that dynamic no doubt: financial regulation is less tangible, Wall Street makes a better villain than insurance companies, folks are tired from the healthcare skirmish, and…
What defines an economic bubble? There are probably technical answers to that question, perhaps even involving percentages and such, but the basic inference is an apparent growth that’s really just full of air, deceiving people into behaving as if the cause of the increase is actually something of substance when, in reality, it could dissipate…
Ron Haskins seeks to answer the question of whether the United States of America is really the land of bootstrap advancement and personal opportunity (subscription required). In a nutshell, he does find economic advancement from generation to generation, but by the numbers, it appears that the economic quintile of one’s parents is more determinative in…
One gets the sense that when certain commentators on the left claim that “tax cuts for the rich” were the most substantial cause of our government’s deficit, they simply mean that the cuts were the part that they liked the least. According to Brian Riedl, the tax cuts — especially just those for “the rich”…