Tag Archives: Topic: Economics

Reuters: San Jose is part of a broader legal and political struggle shaping up across the United States as cash-strapped state and local governments, Republican- and Democratic-led, try to rein in rising pension costs that are gobbling up big chunks of their budgets.

Orin Kerr at the Volokh Conspiracy: Last week I had the pleasure of reading a pre-publication draft of Brian Tamanaha’s new book, Failing Law Schools, which has not yet been released but can be pre-ordered now. I found the book engrossing and its argument powerful. I read it in 2 days after receiving a copy, and I think it should be required reading for all legal academics. Brian’s basic argument is that law schools have been on an unsustainable path fueled by the ready availability of student loans, the cartel power of the ABA, and the influence of the U.S. News rankings, all of which have led schools to adopt policies that help law professors more than they serve students.

NCPA Policy Digest: In 2012, Americans will pay approximately $4.041 trillion in taxes, which is $152 billion, or 3.9 percent, more than they will spend on housing, food and clothing.

The Hill: Observers said the U.S. and China will both be looking for a way out of the diplomatic fight that allows both sides to save face . . . Willson said he expected the situation to quickly be resolved given the two nations’ mutual dependence. The two countries are tied at the hip economically – China is America’s second-largest trading partner and is the largest single holder of U.S. government debt – and China’s support is needed to get anything done in the UN.

Business Insider: “By giving the government unlimited powers, the most arbitrary rule can be made legal; and in this way a democracy may set up the most complete despotism imaginable.” It’s hard to ignore Hayek’s prescient warning . . .

Anna Cuevas at Huffington Post: Is there a correlation between divorce and foreclosure? Does foreclosure increase the likelihood of divorce, or does divorce increase the risk of foreclosure? The answer is both are probably true.

The Hill (video): Krugman, meanwhile, described Paul as “living in the world that was 150 years ago.” “History tells us that in fact a completely unmanaged economy is subject to extreme volatility, subject to extreme downturns. I know this legend that some people like that the Great Depression was somehow caused by the government or the Federal Reserve, but that’s not true. The reality is it was a market economy run amok, which happens repeatedly,” the Nobel Prize winning economist said. That prompted Paul to one-up Krugman, saying the Times columnist “wants to go back 1,000 years or 2,000 years just as the Romans and the Greeks and all other countries debased their currency.”

William McGurn at the Wall Street Journal: Paul Ryan shocked the gentle souls at Georgetown University when he traveled up to their campus last Thursday and said: “We believe that Social Security legislation, now billed as a great victory for the poor and for the worker, is a great defeat for Christianity. It is an acceptance of the idea of force and compulsion.”

CNN: But over the past few decades, we’ve lost sight of Roosevelt’s words. It’s time to rethink the notion of family values and remember, as the story of Willy Loman reminds us, that a strong family starts with a strong economy.

Paul.House.Gov: This month Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric K. Shinseki announced the addition of some 1,900 mental health nurses, psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers to its existing workforce of 20,590 mental health staff in attempt to get a handle on the epidemic of suicides among combat veterans.

Steven Malanga at the Wall Street Journal: Indiana’s debt for unfunded retiree health-care benefits, for example, amounts to just $81 per person. Neighboring Illinois’s accumulated obligations for the same benefit average $3,399 per person.

Jonathan V. Last at the Weekly Standard (4/23): As fertility falls, populations shrink. As populations shrink, economies will sputter. Western countries will struggle to support too many retirees without enough workers, and the rest of the world (particularly places such as China and Russia) will be challenged just to maintain order as societies change in unprecedented ways: Most people will have neither brothers, sisters, aunts, nor uncles, and there will be no such thing as an extended family. This forecast may sound apocalyptic, but it’s nearly conventional wisdom among the demographers and economists who study such things . . .

The Georgetown Voice carries this article: Faculty question Rep. Paul Ryan’s use of Catholic social teaching. Ryan has this article at the National Catholic Register: Applying Our Enduring Truths to Our Defining Challenge.

Jeff Carter at Townhall: From kindergarten to secondary school, our government has screwed up the process. Back in the 1950′s our schools were considered the greatest in the world. But over time, as the federal government has stuck its finger in the pie, the upward trajectory of our educational system has declined. Our public schools are now second rate. The quicker we get government out of the educational market, the better off our entire society will be.

Thomas Messner at the Heritage Foundation: According to the Alliance Defense Fund, “Sixty-three million Americans have voted on marriage, and in 31 out of 31 states they have protected marriage as the union between one man and one woman.”

Daily Campus: In fact, notes Williams, if the annual inflation rate were calculated using the same method with which it was calculated in 1980, it would currently be over 10 percent. Furthermore, I fear inflation may worsen dramatically in the next few years.

Mike Shedlock at Townhall: Illinois is bankrupt and corrupt politicians like governor Quinn, Speaker of the Illinois House, Mike Madigan, and all the union panderers in Chicago ruined the state by giving into “collective bargaining” demands from public unions.

Carson Holloway at Public Discourse: Libertarians and conservatives should not allow their differences to impede political cooperation against the common adversary: egalitarian liberalism.

Cathi Herrod at AZ Republic: And children raised in an environment with a married mom and dad have the best opportunity to succeed and learn personal responsibility, meaning they are less likely to grow up and depend on government programs. The link between strong families and a strong economy is inseparable — you can’t have one without the other.

The HIll: “I want them to take a bigger look,” Boehner said at a Wednesday press conference. “And the bigger look is, if we don’t make decisions, these programs won’t exist, and then they’ll really have something to worry about.”

Orin Kerr posts excerpts of the opinion at the Volokh Conspiracy Blog (Judges Brown and Sentelle Urge the Supreme Court to End Rational Basis Review of Economic Regulations): America’s cowboy capitalism was long ago disarmed by a democratic process increasingly dominated by powerful groups with economic interests antithetical to competitors and consumers. And the courts, from which the victims of burdensome regulation sought protection, have been negotiating the terms of surrender since the 1930s . . . The hope of correction at the ballot box is purely illusory . . . | Hettinga v. United States

LA Times: This year’s study says the average stay-at-home mom’s compensation would total $112,962 a year. (Romney would probably earn more because she was raising a larger-than-usual family of five boys.)

Washington Post: To me, the [Catholic] principle of subsidiarity, which is really federalism, meaning government closest to the people governs best, having a civil society of the principle of solidarity where we, through our civic organizations, through our churches, through our charities, through all of our different groups where we interact with people as a community, that’s how we advance the common good.

C-FAM: The global fertility freefall is about to cause geopolitical upheaval in Asia, a panel of experts said this week. The experts, all contributors to the new book Population Decline and the Remaking of Great Power Politics, spoke at the world’s largest gathering of international relations specialists meeting in San Diego, California.

San Francisco Chronicle: Many people, largely confused by the long held belief married couples pay more in taxes than those who are single, have held on to that line of thinking as a reason to avoid tying the knot. Not only is it untrue, there are other reasons why marriage makes financial sense.

Jennifer Roback Morse at Public Discourse: The primary business of the state is justice. Because children cannot be autonomous, adult society has an obligation in justice to provide institutional structures that protect their most basic interests.

Jennifer Roback Morse at the Ruth Institute: Libertarians are being taken in by rhetoric that sounds libertarian but, in fact, will lead to a dramatic shift in the balance of power between the state and civil society, indeed between the state and the natural order itself.

Mike Shedlock at Townhall: Distressed cities are finally doing what they should have been doing long ago, declaring bankruptcy to force concessions from public unions.

Fox News: . . . “I get up every morning thinking, today I’m gonna make a difference. Today I’m gonna end capitalism. Today I’m gonna make a revolution. I go to bed every night disappointed, but I’m back again tomorrow. That’s the only way you can do it.”

Lawrence Goodman at the Wall Street Journal (via Google): Last year the Fed purchased a stunning 61% of the total net Treasury issuance, up from negligible amounts prior to the 2008 financial crisis. This not only creates the false appearance of limitless demand for U.S. debt but also blunts any sense of urgency to reduce supersized budget deficits . . .

Conservative Home Blog: During the budget speech, the Chancellor announced that “we will introduce legislation limited to relaxing the Sunday Trading laws for eight Sundays only, starting on 22nd July.”

NCPA Policy Digest: Moreover, 70 percent of all net profits made by China’s centrally-owned enterprises in 2009 came from only 10 companies that had been bestowed heavy market advantages by the state.

AWR Hawkins at the Daily Caller: We’ve arrived at that place Ben Franklin warned us of when he shared his concern that one day Americans would trade liberty for security.

NCPA Policy Digest: One of the primary arguments made by opponents of school choice programs is that by allowing students to leave public schools, the fiscal security of those schools will inherently be made worse. In supporting this point, they emphasize that if a student leaves a school, many fixed costs still remain that will become more expensive per student, says Benjamin Scafidl, a fellow with the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice.

Michael J. Boskin and John F. Cogan at the Wall Street Journal: California’s rising standards of living and outstanding public schools and universities once attracted millions seeking upward economic mobility. But then something went radically wrong as California legislatures and governors built a welfare state on high tax rates, liberal entitlement benefits, and excessive regulation. The results, though predictable, are nonetheless striking.

Pat Buchanan at Townhall: The gravest problem facing the Land of the Rising Sun is that it is dying. The sun that set on the Japanese Empire in 1945 has begun to set on the Japanese nation. A week before the anniversary of 3/11, buried in a story about Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda’s effort to rally support for a doubling of the 5 percent consumption tax, to preserve Japan’s social security system, was this startling statement: “We’re faced with an aging society and a declining birth rate unprecedented in the history of mankind.”

Reuters: Susanna Mancini cherishes a photo of herself at 27: a smiling face behind a pair of dark sunglasses. On it, she scrawled to her future husband: “Too bad you can’t see my eyes. I am so proud of my tough yuppie stare!”

Turtle Bay and Beyond: According to an interview published in the WSJ the prospects of investment returns for babyboomers with money in US markets are “depressing” because of the slow demographic growth in the US.

Phyliss Schlafly at Townhall: Contrary to politicians who want to call a truce about social issues, there is absolutely no way to separate social and fiscal issues; they are locked in a tight political embrace. Politicians who say we can ignore social issues or avoid talking about them, are really saying that they have no plan to cut federal spending and the growing national debt.

NCPA Policy Digest: Columbia University looked at federal aid data from 1996 to 2008 and found that, on average, colleges raised tuition $17 in response to every $100 of Pell Grant aid.

Turtle Bay and Beyond: Recently, the HSBC Global Research department released a report forecasting the trends in world economic development for the next 40 years. Countries with growing population and improving rule of law, education, health and governance will fare much better than those with shrinking population and already high per capita income levels.

James Taranto at WSJ.com: Thus it is a fiction of economics to suggest that increased female labor-force participation was a new source of production. It was, instead, a reallocation of productive resources from homes to offices. No doubt on balance that has been a tonic for the commercial economy. But it has imposed significant social costs.

Futurity.org: Published in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, the study says that by shifting male efforts from seeking wives to paternal investment, institutionalized monogamy increases long-term planning, economic productivity, financial savings, and child investment.

WSJ.com (access via Google): The message from Indiana and elsewhere is that aligning yourself too closely to unions is a losing strategy.

Education News: During a talk at Florida State University, Vice President Joe Biden admitted that government intervention and federal loans that provide subsidies for students to attend college have greatly contributed to the increase in college tuition.

Ryan T. Anderson at Public Discourse: Charles Murray argues we’ve come apart, but can therapeutic Deism and the sexual revolution put us back together?

The Hill: We’re at a point in America where about half of the people are getting something from government and the other half are paying for it, and we’re on track to have 60 percent getting something from government and 40 percent paying for it,” DeMint said.

James Bacon at the Washington Times: The largest debtor and biggest beneficiary of the Fed policy, of course, is the federal government, which owes more than $15 trillion and is on track to owe $16 trillion before the year is out.

David Malpass at WSJ (full access via Google): The central bank should take note when a popular presidential contender calls for limits on its power . . . The Fed’s responsibility is to create confidence in price stability and the dollar, thus providing the best monetary policy environment for full employment. Most central banks operate on this principle. Instead, the Fed has systematically undermined economic confidence by promising to maintain zero interest rates for privileged borrowers. That policy will have to stop if the U.S. is to again achieve impressive growth.

Judge Andrew Napolitano at Townhall: The theory behind the income tax is that the government’s need for cash is so great, it can just take it from your employer after you earn it but before your employer pays you — before you even see the cash — and use it as it sees fit. This presumes that the federal government has a greater right to your income than you do. There really can be no rationale for income taxes without that belief.

James Antle III at WSJ.com: Are Democrats and Republicans now engaged in a ‘death struggle’ over dwindling resources, making gridlock and dysfunction more likely?

NYTimes.com: THE library at the Duncan School of Law may look like nothing more than 4,000 hardbacks in a medium-size room, but it is actually a high-tech experiment in cost containment.

Andy Stern at WSJ.com: Andy Grove, the founder and chairman of Intel, provocatively wrote in Businessweek last year that, “Our fundamental economic beliefs, which we have elevated from a conviction based on observation to an unquestioned truism, is that the free market is the best of all economic systems—the freer the better. Our generation has seen the decisive victory of free-market principles over planned economies. So we stick with this belief largely oblivious to emerging evidence that while free markets beat planned economies, there may be room for a modification that is even better.”

News from The Associated Press: Here are some questions and answers about the crisis . . .

NCPA Policy Digest: Because of the immense size of this baby boom generation, the number of senior citizens will more than double between now and 2050, from 40 million to 89 million.

Josh Gerstein at Politico: When Romney steps on stage tonight for another debate, this one devoted to foreign policy, that kind of China-bashing is likely to be a favorite theme. With a moribund economy, and relatively little traction for other international issues, the threat posed by cheap Chinese imports and Chinese purchases of U.S. debt is an irresistible target.

Telegraph: One sad side effect of China’s economic miracle: 23 million children under the age of five now live apart from both their parents, who have left home to find work in the country’s cities, according to a newly released statistic.

American Family Association Rightly Concerned: Did you know that an average of 23 manufacturing facilities were shut down every single day in the United States last year?

OneNewsNow.com: A spokesman for the Family Research Council (FRC) says his organization’s new study on the family should shock the nation.

NCPA Policy Digest: For years, California could rely on its temperate climate and talented workforce to attract and keep businesses even as taxes and regulations increased. No more. In surveys, executives regularly express the view that California has one of the country’s most toxic business environments, and they say it is one of the least likely places they would open or expand a company.

WSJ.com: Biyan Zhou wanted to major in engineering. Her mother and her academic adviser also wanted her to major in it, given the apparent career opportunities for engineers in a tough job market. But during her sophomore year at Carnegie Mellon University, Ms. Zhou switched her major from electrical and computer engineering to a double major in psychology and policy management.

TheHill.com: This strange fact occurs almost entirely because of our tax laws. If a company wants to bring back money it has made in China or India, it must pay a 35 percent U.S. tax on that repatriation.

Andrew Haines at Public Discourse: Bryan Caplan’s latest book argues that we don’t need to over-invest time and money on our kids, because our lasting influence on their characters is negligible, while their contribution to our material well-being is significant.

Michael LeGault at The Detroit News: In a 2010 NBC-Wall Street Journal poll, 63 percent of respondents said the standard of living will not get better for average families. Hope has been replaced by despair for tens of millions of Americans, the notable exceptions being those lucky enough to reside in Hollywood, academia, Silicon Valley, lawyer-ville or Washington, D.C. — the hotbeds of American liberalism.

Education News: The fault lies, once again, in Congress. In an effort to make college “affordable” for the voters, it expanded the student loan program dramatically in the past 20 years. More student loan money meant colleges were free to raise tuition at more than twice the rate of consumer price inflation every year. In fact, the College Board just announced that the average cost of in-state tuition at a four-year public university rose 8.3 percent this year!

Guardian.co.uk: The world is in danger of missing a golden opportunity for development and economic growth, a “demographic dividend”, as the largest cohort of young people ever known see their most economically productive years wasted, a major UN population report warned on Wednesda

Robert A. Sirico at WSJ.com: It was centralization that caused this mess in the first place. Central banks created paper money, easy and limitless credit, and the moral hazard that accompanies them. Why should we believe that more centralization is the solution when experience suggests precisely the opposite?

Ron Paul at WSJ.com: The continued existence of an organization that can create trillions of dollars out of thin air to purchase financial assets and prop up a fundamentally insolvent banking system is a black mark on an economy that professes to be free.

NCPA Policy Digest: Third, while the federal government may be pretending in this case that state governments are too big to fail, the truth is that bankruptcy of state governments is not a new phenomenon.

Jeremy R. Hammond at Foreign Policy Journal: Paul Krugman tried to slam Ron Paul in his most recent column by writing:

Back in 1980, just as America was making its political turn to the right, Milton Friedman lent his voice to the change with the famous TV series “Free to Choose.” In episode after episode, the genial economist identified laissez-faire economics with personal choice and empowerment, an upbeat vision that would be echoed and amplified by Ronald Reagan.

But that was then. Today, “free to choose” has become “free to die.”

Telegraph: China has called for major strategic concessions from Europe before agreeing to rescue the eurozone, chilling hopes for immediate purchases of Italian bonds.

CNN.com (includes video clips from the debate): Of all the jabs at Perry last night, these mattered most. Social Security stands out as the most important topic generating substantive disagreement among the top Republican contenders.

Is Higher Education Worth It?: Even when the economy recovers, that will not guarantee future earnings for graduates. Because times are substantially different from that of the baby boomers, a serious question to consider is whether students should go to college at all.

Physorg.com: said David Schramm, assistant professor in Human Development and Family Studies in the College of Human Environmental Sciences. “The study confirms that low income does have a negative impact on marital quality, but there are additional factors as well. The relationship between income and marital satisfaction is influenced by other issues, including whether or not the couple receives some form of government assistance.” . . . | David G. Schramm and V. William Harris, “Marital Quality and Income: An Examination of the Influence of Government Assistance,” 32 Journal of Family and Economic Issues 437-448 (Sept. 2011)

France 24: US auto giant Ford has started construction on a $1 billion manufacturing and engineering complex in India as it bets on the country to help drive global growth, a company statement said on Tuesday. The new manufacturing facilities in Sanand in the western state of Gujarat will create 5,000 jobs