Economy
Trade isn’t a topic on which I can express all of the relevant arguments, but this suggestion from University of Maryland School of Business Professor Peter Morici sounds reasonable to me: China is the biggest problem. It subsidizes foreign purchases of its currency, the yuan, more than $460 billion a year, making Chinese products artificially…
Things aren’t equal on the highway. Some folks happen to pull into pockets of traffic that engulf them for an entire commute, while some ease into the lull just five minutes earlier. Some folks have faster cars; some folks have bigger, more-imposing cars. Some have drivers; some have GPS; some have government plates. Some are…
PROEM: We’d like to encourage this sort of conversation, so commenters will have a very short leash for ad hominem with this post. Matt Jerzyk’s response to my post about the rich giving their money to we in the working class strikes me as so tangential as to raise a wholly separate topic, and as…
Over on Kmareka, David Jaffe suggests that, thanks to those awful ultra-rich, working-class Americans have every reason to be bitter. Joins in commenter Miami Mama: If those ultra-rich would spend just a fraction of their wealth to help the poor and middle-class instead of selfishly splurging on themselves, it would be a much better world.…
The April 7, 2008 edition of National Review (dead-tree: subscriber only) contains a piece by Stephen Spruiell, “The Buckeye Stops Here,” that focuses on the Ohio economy. Here’s an illuminating excerpt:
What a jumble has politico-economic thought become in America! It’s as if so much access to information (and ability to propagate it) has served mainly to allow us all to slip into ruts of prepared thoughtlines. Consider this interesting comment from Evan, at RIFuture (emphasis added): What most “free market” bozos ignore is that most…
So flawed is the construction of the ballyhooed income gap finding that one hardly knows where to begin. How about with a statement of principle on page 17 of the source report (PDF)? The United States was built on the ideal that hard work should pay off, that individuals who contribute to the nation’s economic…
Anybody who missed it on Sunday should take a moment to read URI Business Administration Professor Edward Mazze’s “10 steps to right R.I.’s dire financial state“: Any optimism for job creation next month has disappeared as the state, region and national economy slide downward. For years, we have been dealing with a partial truth that…
It’s a favorite argument of some of the antagonists ’round here to insist that household incomes have remained stagnant. The unions only look like they’re raking it in, you see, because they’re advancing at the rate that should be universal. Now, we can (and often do) argue that the benchmark relies on impossible mandates, but…
PROEM II: Not wanting to allow a disagreement about what to call them get in the way of the ideas being presented, I’ve re-edited my original post to remove any direct association between Professor Schmeling and the assumptions that I believe necessarily underlie his argument that a community where x% of jobs are located is…
