Tag Archives: Topic: Economics

Joel J. Miller at Patheos: The book is The Humane Economy: The Social Framework of the Free Market, and I think it warrants quoting at length, particularly from the first chapter, which helps explain the crisis in modern Western social and economic systems and explains where Röpke was coming from in addressing the problem: People may be led by Christian and humane convictions to declare themselves in sympathy with socialism and may actually believe that this is the best safeguard of man’s spiritual personality against the encroachments of power, but they fail to see that this means favoring a social and economic order which threatens to destroy their ideal of man and human freedom. . . .

Jordan Bloom at the American Conservative: In honor of F.A. Hayek’s birthday, let’s consider for a moment how he misread himself. In his essay “Why I Am Not A Conservative,” the economist and philosopher argued for a radical anti-state program, …

Samuel Gregg at Public Discourse: Conservatives need to stop shying away from principled, as opposed to merely utilitarian, defenses of economic freedom and its associated institutions.

Former Sens. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) and Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) at The Hill: After trying private negotiations, bipartisan commissions, informal “gangs” and a supercommittee, the search for a long-term federal fiscal plan has come full circle back to where it started — regular order under the budget process in Congress. Or has it?

LiveScience: “This is because traditional economic models of marriage have argued that men who have high earning potential are more likely to marry at an older age so that they can ‘reveal’ their high potential,” explained Hani Mansour, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Colorado Denver. [I Don't: 5 Myths About Marriage]

Forbes: Michigan’s Republican governor, Rick Snyder, was among the many GOP state executives who made national headlines this winter by endorsing Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid, America’s government-run health insurance program for the poor. But what isn’t making headlines is that Michigan’s legislature, like its counterparts in Florida, Ohio, and Arizona, is not going along.

Politico: Congressional leaders in both parties are engaged in high-level, confidential talks about exempting lawmakers and Capitol Hill aides from the insurance exchanges they are mandated to join as part of President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul, sources in both parties said.

James Taranto at Wall Street Journal: It’s one of the basic contradictions of contemporary feminism: On the one hand, it’s supposed to be about choice for women; on the other hand, some choices are more equal than others–and certain ones, such as marrying young, provoke extreme hostility, as the Patton kerfuffle demonstrated.

Robert J. Samuelson at Washington Post: It’s hard to overstate the breakdown of marriage and the rise of single-parent families. Consider out-of-wedlock births. In 1980, about 18 percent of births were to unmarried women; by 2009, the proportion was 41 percent. Among whites, the increase was from 11 percent to 36 percent; among African Americans, from 56 percent to 72 percent; among Hispanics, from 37 percent (1990) to 53 percent. Or look at the share of children living with two parents. Since 1970, that’s dropped from 82 percent to 63 percent. Among whites, the decline is from 87 percent to 73 percent; among African Americans, from 57 percent to 31 percent; among Hispanics, from 78 percent to 57 percent. Just what caused these changes remains controversial.

CitizenLink is proud to work with the Michigan Family Forum and other organizations across the country to stand for marriage, life and religious freedom. Summary: A woman’s marital status at the time of her pregnancy is a significant factor in putting her child at risk. Nearly two-thirds of out-of-wedlock births and many of the subsequent health problems are paid for with public funds. Furthermore, unmarried mothers are more likely to depend on public assistance years after the child is born. While most out-of-wedlock pregnancies are unintended and to young women, a surprising number are intentionally conceived.

Philip Cohen at The Atlantic: For a few decades, women’s rising share of the workforce probably led to fewer women getting married. But that’s not the case anymore.

Kevin Swanson at Vision Forum Ministries: What do you do with a society where the young 30-year-old men are playing computer games, and the 65-year-old men are playing golf? What happens to a society where there are far more retirees than Generation Y’s in the work force, especially if the social security system is nearing bankruptcy? This is where we are today, and the economic situation is dire. Unless we change the way we educate, the way we do our economics, and the way we integrate our families, I tremble to think of what will happen in the upcoming decades. Now is the time to redefine a biblical economy based upon the re-integration of the family.

Asbury Park Press: But there’s also a more strictly economic case. In a paper for Third Way, a liberal think tank, economists David Autor and Melanie Wasserman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology attribute the decline of marriage — which, like Murray, they say is concentrated among the poorly educated — to the eroding economic heft of men compared with women

NY Times: “The health care model is unbelievably subsidized, and while I favor finding some version of it for legal needs, it is never going to be ratcheted up to that level,” Professor Wilkins of Harvard said. “We should think more about public-private partnerships and loosening up some of the restrictions on law practice without junking them all. What we need now is experimentation, like what is happening in South Dakota.”

David Blankenhorn and Jonathan Rauch at NY Daily News: Gay marriage is here. It is already part of our social fabric. But don’t savor the moment for too long. There’s much more to marriage equality than gay marriage equality. Marriage today is fracturing along class lines.

NCPA Policy Digest: Jonathan Last’s recent book, What to Expect When Nobody’s Expecting: America’s Coming Demographic Disaster, notes that increasing college attendance, the delay of marriage, the birth control pill, religious participation, the rise of the thousand-dollar stroller and Social Security are some reasons fertility is falling, says Michael Rosen of the American.

Daily Mail: The number of Americans living in poverty has spiked to levels not seen since the mid 1960s, classing 20 per cent of the country’s children as poor

NCPA Policy Digest: As the health care system changes drastically over the next three years, more doctors than ever are planning on retiring. The retirements will occur as autonomy decreases under federal oversight and income falls under price controls. A survey of 600 doctors finds that physicians are pessimistic about the future, says Everyday Health.

Investor’s Business Daily: Americans are migrating from less-free liberal states to more-free conservative states, where they are doing better economically, according to a new study published Thursday by the George Mason University’s Mercatus Center . . . The freest state overall, the researchers concluded, was North Dakota, followed by South Dakota, Tennessee, New Hampshire and Oklahoma. The least free state by far was New York, followed by California, New Jersey, Hawaii and Rhode Island
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Authur B. Laffer and Stephen Moore at WSJ: In short, red states of the South and other areas of the country are moving forward with pro-growth tax reform, while California and the blue states of the Northeast are doubling down on Obamanomics and European progressivism. Who will come out on top? Our money is on the red states and those wisely following their lead.

CBS New York: With the cost of living on the rise and showing no sign of slowing down, total strangers desperate to save money are moving in together.

Real Clear Politics: A new study finds that insurance companies will have to pay out an average of 32 percent more for medical claims under President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul. What does that mean for you?

Business Insider: It’s what I like to call “the most depressing slide I’ve ever created.” In almost every country you look at, the peak in real estate prices has coincided – give or take literally a couple of years – with the peak in the inverse dependency ratio (the proportion of population of working age relative to old and young). In the past, we all levered up, bought a big house, enjoyed capital gains tax-free, lived in the thing, and then, when the kids grew up and left home, we sold it to someone in our children’s generation. Unfortunately, that doesn’t work so well when there start to be more pensioners than workers.

NCPA Policy Digest: Sears Holdings Corp. and Darden Restaurants Inc. have a new approach to offering their employees health benefits. Each firm gives their workers a sum of money and allows them to choose their health plans from an online marketplace. The system allows workers to take on health cost risks to save money, says the Wall Street Journal.

Washington Post: Delaying marriage can increase the economic fortunes of educated women, according to “Knot Yet: The Benefits and Costs of Delayed Marriage in America.” The new report was sponsored by the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, and the Relate Institute.

Ezra Klein at Washington Post: A more accurate way to put it would be that in the coming decades, new spending is almost entirely driven by health-care programs. But what’s really driving the spending in those programs is the aging of the population, not the rise in health-care costs.

The Atlantic: This was the most shocking statistic I read this weekend: 58 percent of first births in lower-middle-class households are now to unmarried women. Meanwhile, two in five of all births are to unwed mothers, an all-time high, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

J. Daniel Hammond at Public Discourse: The positivist turn in the understanding of reality and the related claim that empirical science is the only source of knowledge have created a faith that economics, or psychology, or neurology, or evolutionary history can potentially explain all that can be known of human behavior. Modern scholars, economists included, are trapped in a ditch that was first dug four centuries ago with the dawning of the “Enlightenment.” The ditch is now so deep that they cannot see over the top. As Pope Benedict pointed out in his address to the science faculties of the University of Regensburg, if all knowledge is based on science and science is restricted to empirically falsifiable statements, then it is man himself who ends up being reduced. Economists have made a significant contribution to the reduction of marriage and family to the merely mundane.

The HIll: The cuts to the court system from sequestration are “simply unsustainable,” Justice Anthony Kennedy warned Thursday.

AP: A record number of U.S. counties – more than 1 in 3 – are now dying off, hit by an aging population and weakened local economies that are spurring young adults to seek jobs and build families elsewhere.

John Berlau at National Review: Small firms are boarding as fast as they can onto the SS Self-Insurance. And that has the Times and other boosters of the Obamacare Titanic in a tizzy . . . But now a market for “stop-loss” insurance for firms that self-insure has emerged to address that problem. This type of insurance will reimburse a firm for its employees’ health costs if those costs go beyond a certain threshold, known as an “attachment point.”

CBS: Blankfein was the first leader in corporate America to take a public stand supporting same-sex marriage in a commercial recorded early last year for the Human Rights Campaign. He calls it an important issue because he sees how it relates to recruiting and retaining people at the firm.

Foreign Policy: The initiative committe is led by politician Heinz Hürzeler, a member of the country’s Social Liberal Movement, and maintains that in Switzerland, where 12 percent of pregnancies end in abortion, the practice represents a huge blow to the economy (comparatively speaking, Switzerland has one of the lowest abortion rates in the world, with only 6.4 abortions for every 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 44)

Telegraph: A Chinese wealth survey has found that Asia has more billionaires than any other continent, apparently surpassing North America for the first time.

National Review: We’re in a serious enough demographic bind that we’re all going to have to work together to figure out a way to make this thing work. The thing is, when your fertility rate is sub-replacement, you enter a zero-sum game where either older folks aren’t going to get the benefits they were promised or young workers are going to face much steeper tax rates. How the politics of this issue resolves over the next 20 years will be one of the most interesting stories around. Will older Americans relinquish some of their claims? Will younger workers volunteer to pay more? Will there be some grand bargain? The truth is, no one knows how it will end. We just know that something has to give.

Heritage Foundation: National Marriage Week (February 7–14) is drawing attention to the link between the collapse of marriage and child poverty—and its cost to America.

Cynthia Davis at Townhall: We now live in a time where social welfare incentives have engendered unprecedented numbers of unmarried parents, causing record deficits. The inability to address this issue has politically-hobbled every Republican president since Reagan. Our government needs to take responsibility for creating this monster and start on a new path of adopting policies that are good for families.

David Frum at CNN: The long debate on same-sex marriage is coming to an end. A plurality of Americans now support same-sex marriage; the figure is 63% among voters under 30. The rest is just a matter of time. The end of the same-sex marriage debate does not, however, settle the problem of marriage in America. Not remotely. Among the 95% to 97% of Americans who are not gay, the institution of marriage continues to weaken — with ominous consequences for the next generation.

CNSNews: Forty years of legalized abortion have profoundly demoralized American society, not only weakening respect for human life but undermining marriage, parenthood and individuals’ sense of duty to others, said U.S. Cardinal J. Francis Stafford

Washington Post: The drastic $85 billion in automatic spending cuts Congress approved in hopes of heading off another deficit showdown may or may not occur, but federal agencies say the threat has been disrupting government for months as officials take costly and inefficient steps to prepare.

Telegraph: The cost of raising a child has hit an all-time high, according to a new report. Figures from insurer LV=’s annual Cost of a Child Report show that the cost of a bringing a child up to the age of 21 has reached £222,458 – more than £4,000 higher than last year and up £82,000 on ten years ago.

NCPA Policy Digest: A new joint publication by the Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal depicts a world where economic freedom is decreasing.

Gary King at the NY Times: CONGRESS and President Obama have pushed through a relatively modest stopgap measure to avoid the “fiscal cliff,” but over the coming years, the United States will confront another huge cliff: Social Security.

Minding the Campus: Failing Law Schools, a recent book by Brian Z. Tamanaha, a law professor who has also been a law dean, savages American legal education–and rightly so. Tamanaha’s criticisms go something like this: the ABA accreditors and their allies control and dictate to legal educators. The controllers are the deans, professors, librarians, etc. who use accreditation to force on all schools their desired model of legal education, a model which is beneficial to the faculty.

Joe Carter at LifeSiteNews: Economic growth is therefore not, as McCarraher claims, the “beatific vision of the capitalist moral imagination.” It’s neither a goal that should be pursued for its own sake nor a means to achieve a materialist paradise. Economic growth is not the chief end of man, but merely the blessing that results from fulfilling God’s cultural mandate.

Kathleen Parker at the Washington Post: “Marriage is not merely a private arrangement; it is also a complex social institution. Marriage fosters small cooperative unions — also known as stable families — that enable children to thrive, shore up communities, and help family members to succeed during good times and to weather the bad times. Researchers are finding that the disappearance of marriage in Middle America is tracking with the disappearance of the middle class in the same communities, a change that strikes at the very heart of the American Dream.”

National Law Journal has posted its 2012 Law Firm Billing Survey.

The Hill: Deficit-reduction proposals from Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and President Obama fall short of clearly stabilizing the debt, according to budget experts, putting the U.S. credit rating at risk of a downgrade.

Mona Charen at National Review: It in’t a matter of urgent national importance when non-parents choose to live together without benefit of clergy (I love the old-fashioned expression). When children come into the picture, it is. There is simply no controversy about the data: Two-parent married families are best for children — and best for society.

CNSNews: According to a recent Gallup poll that asked participants if they have a positive or negative image of socialism, 53 percent of Democrats and “leaning democrats” said they have a positive image while 23 percent of Republicans and “leaning republicans” said their image is positive.

Sohrab Ahmari at Wall Street Journal: So is it still possible to pull back from the brink of America’s Europeanization? Mr. Mansfield is optimistic. “The material for recovery is there,” he says. “Ambition, for one thing. I teach at a university where all the students are ambitious. They all want to do something with their lives.” That is in contrast to students he has met in Europe, where “it was depressing to see young people with small ambitions, very cultivated and intelligent people so stunted.” He adds with a smile: “Our other main resource is the Constitution.”

AP reports.

Politico: And Club for Growth, a longtime small-government group, said Reps. David Schweikert (R-Ariz.), Tim Huelskamp (R-Kan.) and Justin Amash (R-Mich.) were “free of the last remnants of establishment leverage against them” after they were booted from their committees by the House Republican Steering Committee for crossing leadership too often.

Steve Aden on the Bob Dutko Show WMUZ 103.5FM in Detroit. | MP3 audio 8:02 mins

NCPA Policy Digest: The renewable fuel standard (RFS) is increasing the biofuel-blending requirements. This change can give rise to numerous damaging spillovers throughout the economy, says Marlo Lewis, a senior fellow in environmental policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institu

NCPA Policy Digest: Consumer-directed health plans are gaining popularity as many employers are beginning to offer them in an effort to reduce health care costs, says the Los Angeles Times.

Christian Institute: Morrisons and Asda have called for an increase in Sunday trading hours at Christmas – but Tesco is resisting such a move saying the day is still “special” for many.

CNBC: Some 45 percent of those polled said the holiday season brings so much financial pressure, they would prefer to skip it altogether. Almost half said their level of stress related to holiday expenses is high or extremely high. That’s probably because nearly the same amount — some 45 percent — say they do not expect to have enough money set aside to cover holiday expenses.

Lawrence Journal World: He said births to unmarried women nationwide have increased from around 30 percent in 1993 to 40 percent now. The poverty rate for children in female-headed households is 41 percent, while it is about 9 percent for married couples, he said.

The Hill: Retiring Rep. Ron Paul plans to deliver speeches on college campuses next year and beyond, continuing his message of liberty and reducing the size of the federal government. In an interview with The Hill, the Texas Republican clearly indicated that he isn’t ready for the rocking chair.

NY Times: Limbaugh echoed a Republican theme that was voiced before and after the election: Barack Obama has unleashed a coalition of Americans “who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it — that that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them” — as Mitt Romney put it in his notorious commentary on the 47 percent. You can find this message almost everywhere on the right side of the spectrum . . . In fact, the 2011 Pew Research Center poll Bennett cites demonstrates that in many respects conservatives are right to be worried:

Ms. Magazine: A recent study conducted by UC San Francisco’s Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH) found that women who are denied an abortion in the United States are three times more likely to be under the federal poverty line. Of 956 women who sought abortion care, the study found that 65% of “turnaways” (women who were denied abortion care) were below the poverty line compared to 56% of women who had abortions. Two years after seeking an abortion, turnaways were three times more likely to be below the poverty level compared to women had abortions.

The Washington Post embeds video of the speech.

Amy Ziettlow at Family Scholars: More than a century and a half ago Alexis de Tocqueville made the striking observation that an individualistic society depends on a communitarian institution like the family for its continued existence. The family cannot be constituted like the liberal state, nor can it be governed entirely by that state’s principles. Yet the family serves as the seedbed for the virtues required by a liberal state. The family is responsible for teaching lessons of independence, self-restraint, responsibility, and right conduct, which are essential to a free, democratic society. If the family fails in these tasks, then the entire experiment in democratic self-rule is jeopardized.

Wall Street Journal: Shedding light on the issues of divorce and health care, a new University of Michigan study estimates that 65,000 American women become uninsured each year as a result of marital dissolution.

Ryan Anderson at Double Think: Is there really “something highly contradictory,” as Kathryn Shelton argued here on Doublethink, about a position that “advocates the regulation of marriage, but rallies behind a platform for smaller government”? Or, on the contrary, is the promotion of marriage critical to limited government, as traditionalist conservatives—among others—regularly contend?

Washington Times: He added, “You cannot have a budgetary solution if you do not change what the role of government should be. As long as you think we have to please the world and run this welfare state, all we will argue about is who will get the loot.”

Rev. Robert Sirico at the Acton Institute: Another way of looking at this is to understand that freedom itself is not a virtue, but rather the context in which virtue (or vice, for that matter) becomes evident. If a free market is the expression of the liberty of economic actors to satisfy their needs, then the morality of the market will depend on whether or not those desires and their fulfillment was moral in the first instance.

CNSNews: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said on Wednesday that if the $16.394 current legal limit on the federal government’s debt must be raised in the next few months by another $2.4 trillion, “We’ll raise it.”

Spiegel.de: The Chinese are seen as victors in the global financial crisis, and as both a hope and a threat to German industry. Beijing wants to be more than the world’s factory. But the country’s economic engine is showing signs of stalling and it is uncertain what direction it will take in the future . . . China is on a global buying spree, and it sees the current economic crisis in Europe and the United States as an historic opportunity to energetically press ahead with its offensive. The financial services firm PricewaterhouseCoopers estimates that China’s so-called red capitalists spent $23.9 billion on shares in foreign companies in the first half of 2012, or three times as much as in the same period last year.

LifeSiteNews (include video): Pro-contraception activist Sandra Fluke, on a speaking tour for Barack Obama’s re-election campaign, continues to parrot the Obama administration’s party line that children are one of the biggest roadblocks to women’s success.

Acton Institute (includes video and transcript): Justice is rooted in the intellectual tradition as treatment in accord with dessert. In other words, we are bound to treat people as they deserve to be treated. But that raises another question. What do people deserve? And that raised yet another question. Who is the human person who has the right to be treated in a particular way? Now this is where we come upon the most obvious thing about human beings.

AP: Out are the super-sized McMansions in far-flung suburbs and in the sprawling Southwest . . . In are new, 300 square-foot “micro” apartments under consideration for wider development in dense cities such as New York, San Francisco, Boston and …

NY Times: His name is Bernard von NotHaus, and he is a professed “monetary architect” and a maker of custom coins found guilty last spring of counterfeiting charges for minting and distributing a form of private money called the Liberty Dollar.

Kenneth Anderson at the Volokh Conspiracy: One of the more practical debates over the law school business model asks about the third year of law school. Is it actually necessary – and even if, in principle, it might be a good idea, is it at the prices law schools now charge? If it is kept – which seems pretty likely for most schools, given the existing business model – how can it be changed to make it more useful to students?