Economy
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…
Income statistics, however, don’t tell the whole story of Americans’ living standards. Looking at a far more direct measure of American families’ economic status — household consumption — indicates that the gap between rich and poor is far less than most assume, and that the abstract, income-based way in which we measure the so-called poverty…
That it hits so close to home makes the omission that much more glaring, but Lynn Arditi’s article in yesterday’s Providence Journal about floundering Rhode Islanders leaves out a huge component of their plight: The Federal Reserve’s surprise rate cut yesterday came too late for Steven A. Bigelow. His home remodeling and carpentry business, which…
With a H/T to one of my favorite blog sites, Cafe Hayek, watch this YouTube “debate” between Naomi Klein and Milton Friedman. Further videos on Klein vs Friedman can be found at the bottom of this post from Copious Dissent. For more information on Friedman’s underlying ideas, check out these Friedman-centric posts from my earlier…
This and the absurd carbon tax are bad ideas – in fact, for the same reasons. Firstly, no thought has been given to the millions of people of limited means who simply cannot pay such a premium on their gasoline. Are they supposed to stop working? And no, mass transit is not the answer. Beyond…
And to think — as the cost of driving my work van, carting around the tools and materials of a jobsite carpenter, resumes its upswing — Froma Harrop had the solution all along: Take oil. It’s not Bush’s fault that fast-growing China and India have fired up the global demand for oil, thus boosting its…
The U.S. Treasury Department has released a new study, “Income Mobility in the U.S. From 1996 to 2005.” This study examines income mobility of individuals over the past decade (1996 through 2005) using information reported on individual income tax returns. While many studies have documented the long-term trend of increasing income inequality in the U.S.…
That question usually implies that the good times have disappeared, but if by “good times” one means “strong economic growth,” Greg Kaza would argue that the good times have gone to the Red states: Political pundits identify 18 bona-fide Blue states, which backed Democrats Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004, and 29…
