Obama’s Going to Give Us His “New” Economic Plan after His Vacation. Let Me Guess: More Shovel-Ready Projects?
Sounds like more of the same from the Petulant Boy-King and his Council of Pointy-Headed Keynesian Advisors: (From AP) Seeking to jolt the economy, President Barack Obama will propose new ideas to create jobs and help the struggling poor and middle class in a major speech after Labor Day. And then he will try to [...]
The Great Recession vs. The Great Depression – Thankfully, No Contest – Yet.
No matter how bad things seem lately, and how the lamestream media has talked up the severity of our economic downturn, it’s nothing compared to the big one. Hopefully, we can turn the corner before we get too much closer to the big one. (H/T to The Big Picture)
Interesting Stuff
Good stuff I saw this morning: Popehat: Caylee Anthony’s Useful Idiots Reason: Global Temperature Trend Update for July 2011 – I found this interesting because of the comments section. No analysis was presented with this information, and defenders of both sides of the AGW argument proceeded to stand on soapboxes and shout at the other [...]
I Would Normally Wail on Krugman for His Latest NYT Whinefest…
But Smitty over at The Other McCain has already done it for me. Sitting There Feeling Useless sits Paul Krugman, unable to grasp that the American people aren’t buying his swill. ” (Krugman’s quote) The worst thing you can do in these circumstances is slash government spending, since that will depress the economy even further.” Can you not grasp [...]
How Much Would You Take to Give Up the Internet – For Life?
It’s an interesting question, and a good way to demonstrate how free markets create tremendous value in products and services in comparison to what we have to pay. Do you remember how much a cell phone cost when they were brand new? About $4,000. You’d never pay that, right? Well, somebody did – because the [...]
The Obama Stimulus: “Indeed, the Results are Horrifying”
That’s the assessment of James Pethokoukis, Money & Politics columnist for Reuters. In his column today, entitled “Obama (*DfOaLG) really might have made it worse,” Pethokoukis lays out the carnage wrought by Obama’s big fat trillion dollar Keynesian stimulus package: The centerpiece of Obama’s plan to “push the car out of the ditch” was the trillion-dollar (including [...]
Unintended Consequences: Federal Tuition Aid is Driving the Cost of College Higher
From the Cato Institute, and introduction to a pretty lengthy policy analysis paper that draws this conclusion: Federal tuition aid is making college much more expensive, and literally pricing middle class people out of the market (unless they incur huge debts). You wouldn’t think this could be true, but the statistics bear it out. The [...]
Obama Could Start Fixing the Economy – Instead, We’re Headed for Summer of Wreckovery 2
Martin Feldstein was chairman of Ronald Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisors, and is a professor at Harvard. He just might know a thing or two about how to revive a flagging economy, as he helped Reagan drag us out of the ditch that Jimmah Carter put us in. Carter, not unlike Obama, let us Americans [...]
More Hopenchange: Housing Prices Continue 57-Month Decline
Stacy McCain asks “is this the hope, or the change?” He’s referring to the news from the Wall Street Journal that housing prices continued their 57-month decline in the first quarter of this year. Home values posted the largest decline in the first quarter since late 2008, prompting many economists to push back their estimates [...]
Classic Case of What Happens When Government Interferes in Markets: Rent Control in San Francisco
The Bay Citizen reports on one of the effects of government-imposed price controls: shortages. The price-control system? Rent control. It’s been in effect in San Francisco for decades, and like every other place where it’s been implemented, it has the same result: perfectly good housing is taken out of circulation because owners of the properties [...]
Government Intervention in Economic Downturns…Makes Things Worse
Every time government intervenes in an economic downturn, the downturn (or recession) gets longer, and deeper. History has borne this out, yet politicians can’t resist the impulse to “do something” when recession comes. Left to its own devices, the economy will recover much more quickly than if we tinker with monetary policy or inject massive [...]
O.M.G. Is it Possible for Michael Moore to Be this Colossally Ignorant?
Yes, I guess it is. Michael Moore bloviates on how all that cash that rich people and corporations have is really “collectively a resource for all Americans…and we need to start taxing them at the ‘appropriate’ rates” so it’s spread out a little more evenly. Wait – haven’t I heard that “spread the wealth around” [...]
Richard Epstein: Scott Walker’s Reforms Don’t Go Far Enough
Richard Epstein is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institute, and a law professor at New York University and the University of Chicago. He argues (in a lengthy, but interesting article) that the collective bargaining reforms that Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is pursuing don’t go far enough to solve the problem with unions in Wisconsin, [...]
The Dismal Science and Me: 5 – Taxes Discourage Production
Last time we talked about public works projects. They’re often necessary, and fulfill some important need for the citizenry. Large-scale projects, in particular, provide physical, visible, memorable evidence of the results: the Hoover Dam is a fine example of what can be accomplished, as are any number of bridges or other edifices. We also discussed [...]
Pain: Just How Far the U. S. Economy has Fallen in Four Years.
Michael Snyder writing at Daily Markets describes through 11 statistics just how far the U. S. economy has fallen in the last four years. This is a bit depressing, given that the current administration’s policies aren’t going to help things get any better any time soon (and may make it worse). Here are the first [...]
