In my last post, I was critical of over-bureaucratization in higher education. In this post I am focusing on government abuses, and I just happen to have examples from the local, state and national levels. Such a fortuitous turn of events—I say that tongue in cheek of course. The local absurdity concerns a high school […]
Archives
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“It’s easy to remember, $10.10”: The 5% Solution
19 Feb 2014
Target: poverty Number positively effected: 16,500,000 Number pushed above the poverty line: 900,000 900,000/16,500,000 = 5.45% In his State of the Union address President Obama said: “It’s easy to remember, $10.10”. One option for increasing the minimum wage is to increase the federally mandated minimum to $10.10 an hour. Tuesday, the Congressional Budget Office released […]
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Always for the good of mankind, you see. Milton Friedman used to note that there are always two groups pushing for a public policy: the public front group which was supportive of a particular cause, and the private interest group that would benefit. No one ever advocated for government benefits to enrich themselves, rather there […]
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The jury is still partly out on the immediate fate of the Affordable Care Act. After the heroic filibuster of Ted Cruz, the Senate ended debate and voted overwhelmingly to re-insert the funding language for “Obamacare” into the overall spending bill. The vote was 79-19, so there were many Republicans voting with all of the […]
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Government Tyranny and Economic Life
27 Sep 2013
There was an interesting article here by Peter Gumbel http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2013/09/25/with-unemployment-high-france-forces-stores-to-close-early/ earlier this week on what France is doing in the face of high unemployment. Before you read, remember this is France, since the nineteenth century, one of the most socialist (small “c”) nations in Europe, allowing for brief intervals of sanity. It appears that Parisian officlals–the only […]
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Nudge, Nudge
25 Sep 2013
Economics is often thought of as a quasi-hard science; a field where number crunching and rationality yield positive and true results. While Ph.D.s in the field acknowledge that it is often hard to account for all the variables, in the past they would argue that if it were possible to account for all factors, a mathematical […]
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During President Obama’s two campaigns, Republican critics suggested his signature health care law, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) was socialism, since the government was trying to centrally plan 1/7 of the economy. Naturally Democrats reject that characterization, and accuse the Republicans of demonizing the president. Rather than focus on the question […]
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Why we know Obamacare will cost jobs
19 Aug 2013
In my last post on ideologues, I chastised those representing the Obama administration for willful ignorance on the evidence of job loss associated with Obamacare (principally lost hours as workers hours are cut to below the 30 hr/week threshold). While I linked to several anecdotal reports, I did not provide “systematic evidence” of job loss. […]
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When Ideologues Rule
16 Aug 2013
It is all too easy in a blog-filled world for terms to used in ways that are meant to be used simply as an ad hominem attack–we too easily attack the person rather than the policy. And as Christians, we must always endeavor to speak the truth in love. Nevertheless, we cannot avoid the use […]
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Not All Jobs Are Created Equal
01 Aug 2013
I have written about the Keystone Pipeline on this blog before and I do not intend to go back through the reasons why I think it is something the President should support here. I was struck this week, however, by his recent comments that the pipeline would not produce meaningful jobs. He believes it would […]
Bert Wheeler
Jeff Haymond
Marc Clauson
Mark Caleb Smith
Tom Mach