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The Secret Culprit of the Great ’08 Contraction: The Dollar’s Flexibility Upward
That drop was in 2007 (Photo credit: Wikipedia) Not everybody agrees on the causes of the Great Recession, but there is one verity that we all typically hold to: as the collapse really hit back in...
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The Sequester That Saved the Economy
Is this the Dow in 1982? (Image credit: AFP/Getty Images via @daylife) Remember stimulus spending? That’s the stuff that the government is supposed to come up with when the economy goes into...
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Trashing JFK’s Tax Cuts, One of the Greatest Policy Successes of All Time
The most cherished era in American economic history remains “postwar prosperity”—the heady run in the generation after World War II in which growth abounded, jobs were plentiful, the baby boomers were...
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Francis, A Pope from the Developed World
Thomas explained economics to university freshmen (Photo credit: Wikipedia) Francis is the first pope from the Americas/the Southern Hemisphere/the “global south.” That last one is a favorite of those...
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Romney’s 47% Has a Venerable Legacy in the 1913 Origins of the Income Tax
Mellon knew that low taxes on the rich could fund a reasonable government completely (Photo credit: Wikipedia) As we limp toward tax time this early spring, it’s worth giving thought to a hundred...
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To Fund The Federal Government We Don’t Need Federal Taxation
The Fed: We can prove whether these guys are good at what they do. English: (Photo credit: Wikipedia) 1913 is the big year in fiscal-monetary policy history. A century ago, both the income tax and the...
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Trashing The Gold Standard is Now The Stuff Of Amateurs
This basically got things right. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) In 2008, Ben Bernanke’s and Paul Krugman’s star former doctoral student at Princeton, the economist Gauti B. Eggertsson, published an article...
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Veterans Benefits are the Politicians’ New Baby-Kissing
“You know, education, if you make the most of it,…you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.” (Photo credit: Wikipedia) Veterans benefits have been around for ages, and their track record...
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Now We Know Where the Inflation Went
Not all characteristics of the 1970s are required for stagflation to exist (Photo credit: Wikipedia) A question has haunted the aftermath of the Great Recession: where is all the inflation? If the...
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Fracking Pioneer George Mitchell, A Visionary Under and On the Earth
Fracking pioneer and Forbes 400 perennial George P. Mitchell died last week in Texas, age 94. Energy industry sage Daniel Yergin said that on his passing, Mitchell stood as “responsible for what is the...
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Texas Government: Hey, Big Spender
A fact about Texas politics that outsiders are often surprised to learn is that its legislature convenes only biennially. Meeting for a few months every other spring is among the reasons why the Texas...
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Don’t Buy Into The Myth About Universal College Education And Economic Growth
College began across the country last week. Opportunists associated with the higher-education establishment took the occasion to engage in special pleading. First was the leader of the organization...
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Hockey Sticks And Progress: The Industrial Revolution Has Lost Its Greatest...
The most significant event of the last 300 years? Americans, prone to patriotism, will pick our country’s revolution back in 1776. Others might say secularization, the African diaspora, the decline of...
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Obama’s Economy Is Worse Than Bush’s, By Obama’s Own Numbers
President Obama is fond of saying that he came into office in 2009 when the economy was in free-fall, when we were suffering from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, among other...
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This Shutdown Season, The President Garfield Assassination Still Haunts Us
The great government shutdown of 2013 sure has had its moments. Veterans calling for the President to “tear down this wall” jerry-built to close the World War II memorial; Representatives in Congress...
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Janet Yellen Stands For Something That Has Never Worked
Now that the only melodrama in the history of the selection of the Federal Reserve chair nominee has been resolved in favor of Janet Yellen, a moment must be taken as to this figure’s aptness given...
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The Gettysburg Address Is Overrated
If you type the keywords of this title into Google—“Gettysburg address overrated”—you get basically no hits. In this day and age, when anything in an Internet search turns up zilch, it is remarkable in...
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Don’t You Dare Eliminate The Penny
Earlier this month, Henry Aaron of the Brookings Institution lent his name to the cause of getting rid of the penny, our one-cent piece here in the United States. Aaron joins the group of...
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Stop Raising Taxes On The Poor, President Obama
That was a disingenuous speech on economic inequality that President Obama gave last week. “Making sure our economy works for every working American….It drives everything I do in this office,” the...
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For Christmas, Our Thoughtless Government Masters Gave Us Light Bulbs We...
As Americans made their shopping rounds this Christmas, a weird sight cropped up for them at retailers. 40- and 60-watt light bulbs were on fire sale. These would be the incandescent kind, the ones...
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