Tag Archives: Topic: Economy

The American Prospect: To critics, the degree is little more than a scam making extra cash from attorneys desperate to burnish their credentials in a brutal legal job market.

Richard A. Epstein at WSJ: Law schools are under siege. Applications have dropped to around 54,000 annually, from around 100,000 in 2004. First-year enrollment has slipped to under 40,000 students, from 50,000 in 2010. Jobs are scarce—especially for students coming from lower-tier law schools. The average annual tuition has risen to just over $40,000 per year, from about $23,000 in 2001. Average debt on graduation has followed suit, jumping to about $125,000 in 2011, from $70,000 in 2001. No wonder many experts expect perhaps a dozen schools to close their doors within a year while other schools slash their class size, faculty and staff to stay open.

Americans for Tax Reform: sked about Senator Max Baucus’s (D-Mont.) recent “train wreck” comments, President Obama today said, “A huge chunk of it [Obamacare] has already been implemented.” Unmentioned was the wave of destructive Obamacare tax increases that will begin to hit Americans during the next tax filing season and beyond . . .

CNSNews: The federal government is spending $152,000 to study “voice therapy” for transgenders, saying it is incumbent to being “accepted as one’s preferred gender.”

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.

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.

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

Wall Street Journal (via Google): orthwestern University School of Law, one of the country’s top law schools, said it will reduce the size of its incoming class by about 10%, citing declining applications and a “shakeout” in the market for legal jobs.

Law.com: Can’t pass the bar exam? Here’s a $10,000 refund. Two law schools are experimenting with refund programs for graduates who don’t pass the bar examination after two tries, provided they complete a rigorous set of bar preparation courses beforehand.

Rasmussen: Fifty-nine percent (59%), though, say that is no longer possible, up from 55% in late January and the highest level of pessimism in over four years of surveying.

Bloomberg: Consumer spending in the U.S. rose in January even as incomes dropped by the most in 20 years, showing households were weathering the payroll-tax increase by socking away less money in the bank.

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.

NCPA Policy Digest: Villarreal demonstrates that there is a mismatch between job demand through the next decade and the graduates we are producing. It is important that the federal government stop interfering in employment and education markets by curtailing federal student loan programs and equalizing tax credits for all students at all colleges, be they four year or otherwise.

NY Times: The college degree is becoming the new high school diploma: the new minimum requirement, albeit an expensive one, for getting even the lowest-level job.

Wall Street Journal: Law-school applications are at their lowest in a decade, but that hasn’t stopped a handful of colleges and universities across the nation from opening new law schools.

CBS Chicago: Hold on to your wallets: we are in the middle of a gas price spike, and experts say it will only get worse. CBS 2′s Courtney Gousman learned several factors might push the price in our area to more than $4 a gallon.

CNSNews: In a final regulation issued Wednesday, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) assumed that under Obamacare the cheapest health insurance plan available in 2016 for a family will cost $20,000 for the year.

NY Times: Law school applications are headed for a 30-year low, reflecting increased concern over soaring tuition, crushing student debt and diminishing prospects of lucrative employment upon graduation.

AP: Record unemployment and fraying social welfare systems in southern Europe risk creating a new divide in the continent, the EU warned Tuesday, when figures showed joblessness across the 17 EU countries that use the euro hit a new high.

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.

Wall Street Journal: During the negotiations, the White House won a concession from Republicans to allow phaseouts for personal exemptions and limitations on itemized deductions, starting at an income of $250,000 for individuals and $300,000 for joint filers.

Bloomberg: Three and a half years after the worst recession since the Great Depression, the earnings and employment gap between those in the under-35 population and their parents and grandparents threatens to unravel the American dream of each generation doing better than the last. The nation’s younger workers have benefited least from an economic recovery that has been the most uneven in recent history.

Telegraph: The Republican leadership was forced to abandon a vote on its alternative plan to avoid the “fiscal cliff” on Thursday night after its members rebelled at the prospect of raising taxes for millionaires.

AP: As a whole, the U.S. population grew by 2.3 million, reaching 313.9 million people. That growth of 0.75 percent was higher than the 0.73 percent rate in 2011, ending five years of slowing growth rates. Nevertheless, growth levels remains stuck at historically low levels not seen since 1937, restrained by reduced childbirths.

Business Insider: Not only do they want their tuition back, but graduates suing their law schools want the institutions to own up to their alleged lies.

AP: Senate Republican Leader Mitch Connell insisted on Tuesday that President Barack Obama and Democrats spell out where they would cut government spending as part of any massive budget deal to avoid the “fiscal cliff” double hit of automatic tax hikes and spending cuts.

CNSNews: Seventy-three percent of the new civilian jobs created in the United States over the last five months are in government, according to official data published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The Hill (includes video): Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Wednesday offered an amendment to force a vote on President Obama’s deficit-reduction plan, but Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) was having none of it.

Heritage Foundation: It seems that every day now brings another business owner in the news talking about cutting workers’ hours or making other cost-cutting moves in anticipation of Obamacare’s impact in 2013.

AP: Maria Menendez, a 25-year-old caught in Spain’s job-destroying economic crisis, would love to work in Germany as a veterinarian. Germany, facing an acute shortage of skilled workers, would love to have her. A perfect match, it seems, but something’s holding her back: She doesn’t speak German.

AP reports.

National Journal: In 2011, the overall birth rate was 63.2 per 1,000 women of childbearing age, the lowest since at least 1920, Pew reported, citing numbers from the National Center for Health Statistics. The birth rate reached 122.7 in 1957, the peak of the Baby Boom.

Weekly Standard: Don’t the American people have a right to see these taxes and where they will fall? Shouldn’t the President of the United States, the only person who represents everybody in the country, lay out his plan, or must that remain a secret too? Will it just be revealed to us on the eve of Christmas or eve of the new calendar year? We will be asked to vote for it, to ratify it like lemmings, I suppose.”

Randy O’Bannon at Life News: When abortions drop, for whatever reason, that’s a big deal. Precious unborn lives have been saved and their mothers saved from making a terrible mistake.

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

CNBC: Boehner said House Republicans are asking Obama “to make good on a balanced approach” that would including spending cuts and address government social benefit programs.

Reuters: World shares and the euro fell on Wednesday as investors worried that the deep fiscal challenge facing U.S. President Barack a day after his re-election could lead to a new recession.

FoxBusiness.com: Equities, commodities and other risky assets tumbled on Wednesday after U.S. elections left Washington, D.C. as sharply divided as before as the fiscal cliff looms large.

Pat Buchanan at Townhall: Yet whoever wins today, it is hard to be sanguine about the future. The demographic and economic realities do not permit it.

NCPA Policy Digest: Crony capitalism describes an economic system in which the profitability of firms in a market economy is dependent on political connections. Despite the coverage in popular press, little academic research has been devoted to researching the causes and effects of crony capitalism, says Randall G. Holcombe, professor of economics at Florida State University.

NCPA Digest: The recent economic crisis has left many state and local governments with underfunded pension benefits for government employees. However, elected officials are unwilling to make the necessary cuts or tax hikes because both options are extremely unpopular, say Robert Novy-Marx, an assistant professor of finance at the University of Rochester’s Simon Graduate School of Business, and Joshua Rauh, a professor of finance at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

CATO Institute (pdf link available to the full report): Four governors were awarded an “A” in this report card—Sam Brownback of Kansas, Rick Scott of Florida, Paul LePage of Maine, and Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania. Five governors were awarded an “F”—Pat Quinn of Illinois, Dan Malloy of Connecticut, Mark Dayton of Minnesota, Neil Abercrombie of Hawaii, and Chris Gregoire of Washington.

AP: The government borrowed about 31 cents of every dollar it spent in 2012. The string of $1 trillion-plus deficits has driven the national debt above $16 trillion. The magnitude of that figure has intensified debate in Congress over spending and taxes but little movement toward compromise.

CNN: “I grew up in a socialist country and I have seen what that does to people. There is no hope, no freedom, no pride in achievement,” he says with a soft Hungarian accent in the ad. “The nation became poorer and poorer, and that’s what I see happening here.”

Jack Welch at the Wall Street Journal: The economy would need to be growing at breakneck speed for unemployment to drop to 7.8% from 8.3% in the course of two months.

NCPA Policy Digest: The U.S. manufacturing sector has slowly decreased its share of the gross domestic product (GDP) from 27 percent in 1957 to 12.2 percent in 2011.

LA Times: Gov. Jerry Brown took “emergency steps” Sunday to try to bring down record gas prices in the state. He directed the California Air Resources Board to increase the fuel supply by allowing the immediate sale and import of cheaper and more available winter-blend gasoline.

USA Today: In the nation’s densest motoring Mecca, some southern California gas stations are starting to run out of gas. And $5-a-gallon gas could be on the way.

AP: U.S. births fell for the fourth year in a row, the government reported Wednesday, with experts calling it more proof that the weak economy has continued to dampen enthusiasm for having children.

Sean Fieler at the WSJ (via Google): The more than five-fold increase in the median income of the American household since 1971, to $50,000 from $9,000, certainly provides the clear appearance of progress. But after the dollar’s 82% loss of purchasing power over the same period is factored in, the median household income rose just 12%. This much more modest increase is largely the result of the growing prevalence of two-income households . . . The median real income for working men over the same 40-year period rose just 8%. And that improvement only accrued to the ever-shrinking percentage of men fortunate enough to still have full-time jobs—just 67%, according to the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, within a percentage point of the lowest level on record since the figure was first recorded in 1948.

Sun Times: Low-wage workers in Chicago are better educated, older and rely more on that income these days to meet basic needs than 10 years ago.

Washington Examiner: Fifty-five percent of small business owners and manufacturers would not have started their businesses in today’s economy, according to a new poll that also reports 69 percent say President Obama’s regulatory policies have hurt their businesses.

Ron Paul: Because the interest rate is the price of money, manipulation of interest rates has the same effect in the market for loanable funds as price controls have in markets for goods and services.

NY Times: Such survival tactics are becoming increasingly commonplace here, with an unemployment rate over 50 percent among young people and more and more households having adults without jobs.

NCPA Policy Digest: In the face of slow growth, the Federal Reserve has pursued another round of quantitative easing to help alleviate economic concerns. However, the Fed’s policy is simply a regressive redistribution program that has been boosting wealth for those already engaged in the financial sector or those who already own homes, but passing little along to the rest of the economy, according to Anthony Randazzo, director of economic research at the Reason Foundation.

The Hill: Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke underlined his concerns about the fiscal cliff in a closed-door meeting with senators Wednesday. The head of the nation’s central bank met privately with members of the Senate Finance Committee, as he continued to make his case to lawmakers that they must adjust policy before the end of the year to avert a fiscal cliff of tax hikes and spending cuts that economists argue could thrust the nation back into a recession.

Balkinization: Of the dozen-plus misrepresentation lawsuits filed against law schools by their former students, in recent months three have been dismissed (several have survived motions to dismiss and are in discovery). The core basis for the dismissal is the same in all three: prospective students cannot reasonably rely upon employment data posted by law schools . . . These three law schools, and others facing similar suits, undoubtedly count these decisions as victories. But I cannot shake the sense that they mark a deep wound to the standing of law schools.

U.S. Chamber of Commerce: The 2012 State Liability Systems Ranking Study was conducted for the U.S. Chamber Institute for Legal Reform to explore how fair and reasonable the states’ tort liability systems are perceived to be by U.S. businesses.

Human Events: Now the spigot is open — wide open. QE III is here. And the Fed is about to become a campaign issue, whether it likes it or not. Chairman Ben Bernanke announced Thursday that the Fed would spend $40 billion a month on mortgage-backed securities with no set date to end those purchases.

Reuters: The Federal Reserve launched another aggressive stimulus program on Thursday, saying it will buy $40 billion of mortgage-related debt per month until the outlook for jobs improves substantially as long as inflation remains contained.

USA Today: Most college and university endowments have recovered from losses sustained in the recession. Here’s a look at U.S. and Canadian schools that reported endowments for 2011 and, when reported, their maximum pre-recession values. Endowments include investment gains and fundraising. Numbers have not been adjusted for inflation.

USCourts.gov: The Judicial Conference of the United States today agreed to close six non-resident federal court facilities—the latest in a series of cost-cutting measures implemented by the federal Judiciary’s national policy-making body.

AP: Recessions around the world have pushed a growing number of young people out of education and out of the workforce, according to a report Tuesday that warned of growing danger for “the traditional pathway from school to work or family life.”

AP: But hang on to your wallets. Premiums averaged $15,745, with employees paying more than $4,300 of that . . .

NCPA Policy Digest: From 1990 to 2010 the share of expenditures on housing — including principal, mortgage interest, taxes, maintenance and insurance — for these age groups increased about 25 percent.

NCPA Policy Digest: Unions were once an important avenue for protecting workers by providing a powerful tool to negotiate with employers. However in today’s economy it is increasingly less relevant for workers to be represented by unions; it may even hurt the employee more, says James Sherk, a senior policy analyst in labor economics at the Heritage Foundation.

NY Times: The European Central Bank on Thursday announced a sweeping program for buying the bonds of troubled euro zone countries, giving the bank potentially unprecedented power.

Bloomberg: Food-stamp use reached a record 46.7 million people in June, the government said, as Democrats prepare to nominate President Barack Obama for a second term with the economy as a chief issue in the campaign.

CNBC: The world’s largest economy, which was placed 5th last year, fell two positions to the 7th spot – marking its fourth year of decline.

AP reports.

The Church Report: LifeWay Research asked 1,000 pastors about the economy’s effect on their churches and found that 56 percent described it somewhat negatively and 8 percent very negatively . . .

The AP has posted a tally of various countries over the past year.

AP: Many analysts think a third round of bond purchases – QE3 – would include both Treasurys and mortgage-backed securities.

Seth Lipsky at the Wall Street Journal (via Google): In the ferment within today’s Republican Party, there’s a growing realization that America’s system of fiat money is part of the economic problem