Economy
This snippet from the ProJo’s Robert Whitcomb got me thinking: This past Sunday’s Boston Herald detailed, in a story by Phil Restuccia, a growing movement of consumers and local businesspeople called Local First. This national group has organized 17,000 businesses around the country into 50 groups promoting their services directly to local shoppers, appealing to…
I had heard last week that the recently-raided M. Bianco plant in New Bedford had opened it’s doors to applicants and that they were mobbed. As Mark Krikorian reminds, this is just another example that undercuts the claim that illegal immigrants do the jobs Americans won’t do. After the Swift meatpacking raids in Greeley. Colo.,…
Who says that Republican big-business types don’t care about income inequality? From Bloomberg News, via the Boston Globe…Inequality of incomes is the “critical area where capitalist systems are most vulnerable,” [Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan] said yesterday in Washington at a conference on maintaining the competitiveness of US capital markets convened by Treasury Secretary…
Although I’ll resist the temptation to offer snarky comments about the qualities of “serious” columnists, I will acknowledge that they aren’t apparent in Froma Harrop’s lunge into the minimum wage debate: There is a conservative worldview that people who don’t make serious money aren’t serious people. Economic incentives are for entrepreneurs. For the low-of-wage, you…
{N.B. Here at Anchor Rising, we watch (or TiVo) the local Sunday morning shows so you don’t have to. Here is a transcript of this morning’s Channel 12 Newsmakers, hosted by Steve Aveson and also features Ian Donnis of the Providence Phoenix (who has a little more, here). I’ve offered a few (very few) comments…
Economist Larry Kudlow sites a story from the NY Times, which includes this bit: The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Thursday that union membership fell by 326,000 in 2006, to 15.4 million workers, bringing the percentage of employees in unions to 12 percent, down from 12.5 percent in 2005. Those figures are down from 20…
Although I can’t recall any particular instances of his using it, except when helping me with my homework, I associate the phrase “think it through” with my father. It has always seemed, I suppose, to summarize a particular approach to the world — almost a philosophy — that he emphasizes. Not to leap too quickly…
Heh. Something fishy is going on: House Republicans yesterday declared “something fishy” about the major tuna company in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco district being exempted from the minimum-wage increase that Democrats approved this week. “I am shocked,” said Rep. Eric Cantor, Virginia Republican and his party’s chief deputy whip, noting that Mrs. Pelosi…
Here’s a fascinating factoid for the day and a point to ponder in the casino debate, from Michael Mandel et. al in Business Week (h/t Jonah Goldberg)…What you may not realize is that the government’s decades-old system of number collection and crunching captures investments in equipment, buildings, and software, but for the most part misses…
In the July 2006 issue of Hillsdale College’s Imprimis, Larry Arnn interviews Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman on a number of topics. Here are his thoughts on economic issues: LARRY ARNN: In Free to Choose, in the chapter on “The Tyranny of Controls,” you argue that protectionism and government intervention in general breed conflict and that…