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A friend of mine at the Pentagon has told me about an idea that has been circulating on various email circuits. She suggested that everyone make the maximum effort to buy for Christmas only goods, products, and services that are either made in America or that directly support the local community. For example, if a family member goes [...]
Filed under: Economics
NEW YORK – Why should 330 million Europeans face a financial and likely political meltdown for the sake of 11 million profligate Greeks? They should not. Just ask the angry Germans who actually believe there is no free lunch. The best thing for the Greeks and for Europe is for Greece to be asked to [...]
I did a cover article for The American Conservative back in 2005 called “Money for Nothing”. I detailed how more than $20 billion of mostly Iraqi government funds earmarked for reconstruction had disappeared. In one case a Blackhawk helicopter load of $100 bills was handed over to a contact in the Kurdish region without so [...]
Filed under: Economics, Foreign policy, War
Amid this week’s debate over the meaning of a Vatican department’s call for regulation of the global economy, we should note that there are some Catholics who don’t endorse the status quo or a new global Leviathan — these neo-distributists both find fault with current market arrangements and seek local solutions. This position happens to be [...]
Bloomberg reports that Washington has now surpassed Silicon Valley as the metropolitan area with the highest household income. Federal employees whose compensation averages more than $126,000 and the nation’s greatest concentration of lawyers helped Washington edge out San Jose as the wealthiest U.S. metropolitan area, government data show. The U.S. capital has swapped top spots [...]
Filed under: Economics
In his inaugural Washington Times column, Robert P. Murphy draws a line from the NASDAQ bubble to the possible collapse of the Euro: Note the pattern over the last decade: Instead of giving us a painful but standard recession [in the wake of the dot com bust], Alan Greenspan gave us the illusion of a [...]
Filed under: Economics
The Cornell University economist Robert Frank’s latest New York Times editorial is well worth reading, not least for his argument in favor of a progressive consumption tax. (I’m not a fan of any kind of tax, but I think a progressive consumption tax would be far preferable to our current progressive income tax.) That said, [...]
For the third straight year, the median income of the typical American family fell in 2010. Adjusted for inflation, it is back where it was in 1996, the longest period of zero growth since the Depression. And the poverty rate has inched up to 15.1 percent. Both figures, however, should be put in perspective. For [...]
Filed under: Economics, Immigration, Politics
I missed the Republican debate again last night (this time I was bowling), and the first bit of it that I saw posted to Facebook by a liberal friend of mine was this clip of Ron Paul. Wolf Blitzer asked Paul what should happen to a hypothetical, healthy 30-year-old male, who has the means to buy health [...]
Filed under: Economics, Healthcare
Once, it was a Labor Day tradition for Democrats to go to Cadillac Square in Detroit to launch their campaigns in that forge and furnace of American democracy, the greatest industrial center on earth. Democrats may still honor the tradition. But Detroit is not what she was, not remotely. And neither is America. Not so [...]
Filed under: Economics