Private saving and investment are the heart and soul of the dynamic market process. Together they provide and allocate the resources used to augment the economy’s productive capacity, generate sustained long-run economic growth, and thereby make possible a rising level of living. Economic crises interrupt this process by discouraging investors and causing them to...
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The polls seem to indicate that Americans on the margin are sick of Democratic rule. Obama’s approval rating is at an all-time low. Republican politicians look to have a better shot this November than Democrats. On the definite bright side, this means that many Americans are unhappy with the status quo. But will it...
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The Congressional Oversight Panel evaluating the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) concludes “...that the public ‘stigma’ surrounding the Troubled Asset Relief Program has constrained policy choices and may make it politically impossible to take similar rescue actions in the future,” according to this article. The Panel’s report says, “Popular anger against taxpayer dollars going...
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The most recent quote reported in the Wall Street Journal (September 15, 2010) values gold at $1,268.50 per ounce, a historic high, albeit unadjusted for inflation. Will rosy expectations never fail to persist? It is certainly true that the expansionary policies currently being pursued by Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke auger much higher future rates...
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Norm Ormstein, AEI scholar and writer of most of the McCain-Feingold Campaign Reform Law (2002), has an interesting observation relating to the success of non-establishment candidates in GOP primaries. “Out go the country-club Republicans like Mitt Romney, in come the grass-roots revolutionaries like Sarah Palin...America just became a lot more ungovernable than it already...
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Welfare states are unstable, and tend either to give way to free market reforms and liberalization, to collapse under their own weight, or to fall down the slippery slope of interventionism and degenerate into authoritarian regimes. For as long as I can recall, and certainly for decades before I was born, the American left...
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It’s unfortunately getting easier and easier to find confirmation that “regime uncertainty” is the biggest drag on the U.S. economy’s chances of recovery. This, from a front-page story in today’s Wall Street Journal: The U.S. has ample resources to restimulate the global recovery. U.S. companies are sitting on some $1.8 trillion in cash—the highest...
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According to the FBI, violent crimes declined 5.3 percent in 2009, the third year in a row they receded, and property crimes declined 5.3 percent, the ninth year in a row they decreased. Sociologists, political scientists, criminologists, economists, journalists, pundits and policy wonks will no doubt offer up their theories to explain this trend....
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A new study from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco confirms research by Independent Institute scholars that immigrants improve the U.S. economy as a whole, including employment prospects and wages for native-born Americans: total immigration to the United States from 1990 to 2007 was associated with a 6.6% to 9.9% increase in real...
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Each summer, Wall Street strategist Byron Wien convenes a meeting of high rollers to discuss the outlook for investment. This year’s meeting brought together fifty individuals, including more than ten billionaires. Their expectations, as reported by CNBC, are gloomy: “They saw the United States in a long-term slow growth environment with the near-term risk of recession quite...
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