Most disagreement over economic policy is not based on theory; rather it is based on the discordant views about the ability of government to quickly and efficiently spend a stimulus or target a tax cut.
Oil prices are affected by the demand for petroleum products, the available supply of oil, the value of the currency in which it is denominated, and uncertainty about future supply or demand.
The best estimates tell us that about 26 percent of all Americans are mothers, and that the past few decades have seen a big increase in the range of ages of motherhood.
Hauser’s Law, which is really an empirical observation, notes that U.S. income tax revenue has hovered within a percentage point of 19 percent of our total economy for more than 50 years.
Profits are much maligned, and the profit motive is oft depicted as synonymous with greed. This is disheartening. Disdain drawn from ignorance is intellectually lazy.
We know from long experience that, if you raise taxes, you get less economic activity, even if higher tax rates make some people work harder.
We need the remaining month of this Legislature to look a lot less like the last month.
purchasing our debt and being our banker are different matters altogether.
The goal of the legislation is to give public schools more incentives to improve.
It’s a wide entitlement program that will literally explode in the coming decades, since a third of all combat veterans will meet the disability requirements. It is not sustainable, and the Senate just tightened the requirements.
Deregulation of monopolies tends to almost always make consumers better off. Indiana’s broad and effective telecommunications reform of 2006 is a classic example of this.
Being a commodity, changes to oil prices are frequent and instantaneous. Changes to supply or demand of petroleum in the Middle East affect the price at the pump in the Midwest within hours.
It is an old story, but a nevertheless disheartening one. It is also a tale rich in its implications for young workers.
Recognizing inefficiency in government is far more difficult than rhetoric suggests. The private sector has the blessing of the profits to guide decisions.
A casual observer of news about economic indicators has more than enough reason to be puzzled.
What worried me most about the president’s speech was not what he said, but what he didn’t.
Recently, my wife has stopped calling me an economist. It is too hard to explain what I do, so she calls me a professor (which has far more cool points to Harry Potter or Gilligan’s Island fans).
Forecasts are primarily used as a tool to begin, not end, conversations about business and government matters.
There is a certain poignant irony in the U.S. Census Bureau’s release of 2010 poverty statistics this Christmas week. It reminds us that, behind the green eyeshades of professional data collectors, the folks at the Census Bureau have an acute marketing sense.
All economists know that, at its core, inflation is caused solely by too much money chasing too few goods.
