One great way to start a bar fight during an American Economic Association conference is to claim that the U.S. economy is preferable to Europe’s. Someone will undoubtedly start quarreling about how G.D.P. per capita doesn’t measure a person’s happiness. Someone else may point out that if you look at income inequality and entitlements, the [...]
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According to the polls summarized by RealClearPolitics, Mitt Romney has been unable to win more than 25% of the Republican vote for the party’s presidential nomination for more than a year. This is because the former Massachusetts governor is not a pro-growth Republican. Instead, his economic platform reflects a man who is devoutly Keynesian, and [...]
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If you’ve never made a New Year’s resolution, you’re in the minority: One 2006 study found that more than 80 percent of those surveyed had once promised to, say, eat, smoke or spend less after Jan. 1. Unfortunately, research also shows that 80 percent of these resolvers fail. Why do they make promises they can’t [...]
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Governor Mitt Romney’s greatest economic policy weakness is not the timidity of his tax plan, as limited as it is. His Achilles’ heel has been ignored by the media and gone largely unchallenged by those vying for the Republican nomination. And, it is the one part of his economic platform that is virtually identical to [...]
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A string of economic reports this week is likely to reveal that manufacturing and service-oriented companies continue to expand and that businesses are adding jobs at a faster clip. The capstone is Friday’s monthly report on job creation in December. Yet what the data cannot reveal is whether the recent momentum is sustainable in the [...]
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I admit it: My prediction that the Communist Party would fall by 2011 was wrong. Still, I’m only off by a year. In the middle of 2001, I predicted in my book, The Coming Collapse of China, that the Communist Party would fall from power in a decade, in large measure because of the changes [...]
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I’ve written before about whether California is the Greece of America, in part because of crazy policies such as overpaid bureaucrats and expensive forms of political correctness, And we all know that California has one of the nation’s greediest governments, imposing confiscatory tax rates on a shrinking pool of productive citizens. So it is hardly [...]
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In between the happiness of Christmas and the promise of the New Year, permit me to introduce a sour note, a hint of a scold. If you’re like, well, almost everybody, you’re not saving enough. 15% of each paycheck into the 401(k) is the bare minimum you can get away with, not some aspirational level [...]
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Italian borrowing costs continued to ease on Thursday, but interest rates on the longest-term debt remained near unsustainable levels following an undersubscribed auction. The Italian Treasury sold just above EUR 7 billion of long term debt at an auction on Thursday, which was less than its maximum target of EUR 8.5 billion. While 3-year yields [...]
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Last week, Congress and President Obama extended the 2011 payroll tax holiday into the first two months of 2012. It is not yet clear how the holiday, which shaves two percentage points off workers’ Social Security tax rates, has affected consumer demand and the overall economy. But, it is all too clear that the holiday’s [...]
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