BOHANON & STYRING: Trade deficit not as black and white as it seems
Recent reports indicate that the U.S. trade deficit was $500 billion in 2015. Sounds ominous and cataclysmic, but a look behind the number is revealing.
Cecil Bohanon / Special to IBJ
Articles
BOHANON & STYRING: Electricity not a given in some parts of world
the rich of the world should refrain from giving advice to poor nations as to how they get their electricity.
BOHANON & STYRING: Lipstick can’t make this pig of a jobs report look good
In the wake of the May employment report, Labor Secretary Thomas Perez tried to make the best of a report that wasn’t just bad; it was dismal.
BOHANON & STYRING: Turn clock way back to pre-tech economy
A modest proposal: Pass a law outlawing everything patented after 1900. Think of the marvelous effects the law would have on supply and demand almost overnight.
BOHANON & STYRING: Uber is a model for new workplace
The workplace of the future will not be a specific location. It will more and more be wherever people find ways to temporarily interact.
BOHANON & STYRING: EPA’s regulations may have gotten out of hand
The Environmental Protection Agency has since morphed and grown since it was created in 1970. We study bureaucracies. It’s a pretty good rule of thumb that bureaucracies tend to grow.
BOHANON & STYRING: College endowments are not public property
One particularly bad idea just floated by members of the House of Representatives is to raid the endowments of rich colleges.
BOHANON & STYRING: Your annual checkup is really just an oil change
Yes, most health insurance plans protect against large insurable events. The kicker is that most health insurance plans also cover the equivalent of oil changes.
BOHANON & STYRING: Corporations are about the masses, not elites
The corporate form of organization is an innovation that made modern life possible.
BOHANON & STYRING: With collective decisions, no one is fully satisfied
When we vote for someone, we vote for a whole bundle of positions, predilections and philosophies.
BOHANON & STYRING: Why not use auctions to allocate H1-B visas?
Sometimes, prices are intentionally not used to allocate resources. The H1-B visa program is an example. But that doesn’t mean we couldn’t use prices to ration these visas.
BOHANON & STYRING: Monthly jobs reports have many moving parts
Each month, markets and media await the Labor Department’s monthly jobs report. And each month, the headline misses 90 percent of what’s really happening on the jobs front.
BOHANON & STYRING: The rich will pick up tab for fixing Social Security
Social Security will inevitably be changed from an insurance program to a simple welfare program designed to transfer wealth from high earners to low earners in retirement.
BOHANON & STYRING: Impacts of trade deficits poorly understood
It’s natural to think it’s bad to buy more from foreigners than they buy from us.
BOHANON & STYRING: Knee-jerk decision to recycle not always wise
Wealth, technology and relative prices tell us when it makes sense to use a virgin resource from the Earth and when to reuse something.
BOHANON & STYRING: Playing politics with tariffs an unwise course
Tariffs provoke retaliation. Pretty soon you’re in a trade war. The objective of protecting American jobs winds up costing many times more jobs than the ones you set out to protect.
BOHANON & STYRING: Temptation to cheat dooms price-fixing schemes
The Saudis et al. tried to reinvigorate the OPEC cartel, which has been nearly destroyed by new U.S. hydraulic fracturing technology. It didn’t work.
BOHANON & STYRING: Venezuela offers lessons in dangers of inflation
inflation is a sustained and persistent increase in the general level of prices. In the United States, we don’t have much inflation right now, but, historically, governments have conjured up inflation as a way to raise revenue and repudiate debts.
BOHANON & STYRING: Obama budget takes on sports-venue subsidies
Obama’s 2017 budget has one provision that makes us want to send him a belated Valentine! He asks Congress to eliminate a federal tax exemption for interest payments on local bonds issued to build professional sports venues.
BOHANON & STYRING: Look past class warfare to the real numbers
It’s an election year, so politicians talk a lot about taxes. Most candidates tell the middle class and poor they pay way too much in federal income taxes.