Randall G. Holcombe | Tuesday September 21, 2021 at 7:50 AM PDT
The Consumer Price Index numbers for inflation showed a lower-than-expected increase in August, but as this article notes, we still have a lot of inflation. I’m drawing my information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the government’s official measure of prices. The good news is that prices increased by only 0.2% in August, but...
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Randall G. Holcombe | Tuesday July 27, 2021 at 5:07 PM PDT
Jerome Powell, Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, has said that the current uptick in inflation is temporary, and he expects inflation to subside in 2022. Despite rising inflation, the Fed is not in an inflation-fighting mood. Powell’s view rests heavily on interruptions in the supply chain that have...
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Randall G. Holcombe | Monday May 17, 2021 at 1:15 PM PDT
Widely reported in the financial news, inflation skyrocketed in March–the Consumer Price Index was up 0.8% in just one month. Year over year, the inflation rate from March 2020 to March 2021 was 4.2%. Many people have told me they think those figures are understated from their own shopping experience, but I’m taking all...
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Craig Eyermann | Friday April 30, 2021 at 4:08 PM PDT
Do the U.S. national debt and the government’s budget deficits matter? If you listen to the economists shaping the Biden administration’s policy agenda, they say they do not. Their basic argument is that with interest rates so low, the government can borrow as much as politicians want to spend. They think they never have...
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Craig Eyermann | Monday May 4, 2020 at 8:00 AM PDT
Do you remember life before the coronavirus epidemic? Like back in September 2019, when the Social Security Trust Fund was the largest creditor to the U.S. government? The venerable trust fund’s long reign as the biggest single lender of money to the U.S. government has come to an end, because Uncle Sam has a...
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John R. Graham | Thursday February 23, 2017 at 9:36 AM PST
Before the Affordable Care Act passed in March 2010, President Obama repeatedly promised that the typical family’s health premiums would go down by $2,500 after implementing the expansion of health insurance we label Obamacare. Nothing of the sort has happened, of course. For the past few years, prices and spending have appeared moderate by...
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Abigail R. Hall Blanco | Wednesday January 11, 2017 at 8:45 AM PST
It seems like Venezuela always provides great classroom examples for all the wrong reasons. I’ve written on this blog multiple times about the government of Venezuela and the polices it has enacted. I’ve argued that falling oil prices aren’t to blame for the country’s troubles and that the once-high oil prices only masked the underlying...
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John R. Graham | Thursday October 6, 2016 at 3:59 PM PDT
In July 2015, former Enron board member, New York Times columnist, and champion of ever more government control of health care, Professor Paul Krugman, wrote a disturbing blog entry: Wonkblog has a post inspired by the dentist who paid a lot of money to shoot Cecil the lion, asking why he—and dentists in general...
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Abigail R. Hall Blanco | Thursday May 26, 2016 at 12:31 PM PDT
On Sunday night, my husband and I sat down to watch comedian John Oliver’s show “Last Week Tonight.” The news satire program is a guilty pleasure for the both of us. As the host, Oliver often brings humor to many otherwise (rightfully) dreadful topics. Although I usually enjoy the show, that’s not always the...
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John R. Graham | Thursday November 19, 2015 at 9:05 AM PST
October’s Producer Price Index declined 0.4 percent, month on month, and dropped 1.6 percent, year on year. Mild deflation continues to take hold in the general economy. However, it is not so in health care. Of the 14 sub-indices for health-related goods and services, only three declined month on month. Only six declined year...
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