Economy

The Ongoing Squabble Between General Motors & the United Auto Workers Union

By | July 4, 2005 |

This posting continues a discussion about General Motors and the UAW union covered in three previous postings: If You Won’t Deal With Economic Reality, Then It Will Deal With You (includes heavy dose of United Airlines information, too) Outrageous Employee Compensation Liabilities Continue to Haunt General Motors; Will American Taxpayers End Up Paying the Bill?…

Airline Industry: How Government Meddling in Marketplace Costs Taxpayers & Consumers

By | July 4, 2005 | Comments Off on Airline Industry: How Government Meddling in Marketplace Costs Taxpayers & Consumers

Good economic outcomes typically happen when the government does not directly meddle in the marketplace but, instead, acts only to ensure the existence of the rule of law and property rights so third parties can enter into viable contracts as well as count on a level playing field for all participants in the market. Bad…

Economics 101: Never Underestimate the Incentive Power of Marginal Tax Cuts

By | July 4, 2005 |

In the June 13 edition of the Wall Street Journal, Stephen Moore wrote an editorial entitled Real Tax Cuts Have Curves (available for a fee): …The Laffer Curve helped launch the Reaganomics Revolution here at home and a frenzy of tax rate cutting around the globe that continues to this day. The theory is really…

Risk Analysis

By Marc Comtois | June 22, 2005 | Comments Off on Risk Analysis

Anne Applebaum, writing about airport security, also touches on cost-benefit risk analysis. By their own account, federal screeners have intercepted “7 million prohibited items.” But of that number, only 600 were firearms. So, according to the calculations of economist Veronique de Rugy, 99.9 percent of intercepted items were nail scissors, cigarette lighters, penknives and the…

Outrageous Employee Compensation Liabilities Continue to Haunt General Motors; Will American Taxpayers End Up Paying the Bill?

By | June 8, 2005 |

Greg Wallace at What Attitude Problem? highlights this week’s news on General Motors, building on the news previously highlighted here on this blogsite. First, a Washington Post article states: General Motors Corp., the world’s biggest automaker, has offered buyout and early retirement packages to some of its nonunion, salaried workforce in North America as the…

If You Won’t Deal With Economic Reality, Then It Will Deal With You

By | May 1, 2005 |

The overall economic cost structure of the American airline industry is pathetically unsustainable. This is not news; the elephant has been sitting in the room for years now but most everyone has refused to acknowledge its presence.

LNG II: Safety History

By Marc Comtois | April 23, 2005 |

In my last post, I began the process of trying to seperate fact from hyperbole in an attempt to begin to understand the real issues surrounding building or expanding an LNG storage facility in Rhode Island or somewhere on Narragansett Bay. From that post I concluded that the central issue was safety and that it…

Trends in International Markets & Trade

By | March 28, 2005 | Comments Off on Trends in International Markets & Trade

The most recent issue of The National Interest contains an article by Peter Drucker entitled “Trading Places” which discusses international economic trends: The new world economy is fundamentally different from that of the fifty years following World War II. The United States may well remain the political and military leader for decades to come. It…