Krugman’s Mythology of U.S. Banking History
Tuesday May 15, 2012 | Carl Close

Do the banking panics of the late 19th century prove that a safe and sound financial system requires government oversight of banks? Paul Krugman (and most every pundit) seems to think so. In his New York Times column of May 13, he writes: “Current right-wing mythology has it that bad banking is always the...
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The Property Tax Panacea
Tuesday May 15, 2012 | Anthony Gregory

One of the biggest targets of liberal acrimony in California is Proposition 13, the 1978 ballot initiative that capped property taxes at 1% and requires 2/3 of legislative approval to increase most tax rates. It also caps the reassessment of real estate value by 2% per year, barring new construction or a change in...
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California’s Budget Woes
Saturday May 12, 2012 | Randall Holcombe

California’s state budget is now facing a $16 billion shortfall, much larger than it appeared in a January forecast. In a recent post I compared California’s recent budget growth with Florida’s, and noted that while California’s budget has grown by 5.6% since 2006, Florida’s state budget shrank by 5.3%. If California’s budget shrank during...
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Economists Testify on Federal Reserve Before House Committee Chaired by Ron Paul
Wednesday May 9, 2012 | David Theroux

On May 8th, five economists, including our Research Fellow Peter Klein, appeared in testimony before the U.S. House Committee on Financial Services Domestic Monetary Policy and Technology Subcommittee, chaired by Congressman Ron Paul. The panelists included two economists from the Austrian School, two Keynesians, and one monetarist: Peter G. Klein, Research Fellow, The Independent...
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Water and Markets Flow Together in Aquanomics
Wednesday May 9, 2012 | Carl Close

Water shortages and poor water quality are looming threats in many developing countries. By contrast, water supplies and water quality have increased in much of the United States due to a specific policy innovation: water markets and market-like exchanges. The growing participation of wildlife agencies and conservationists in water markets and exchanges is especially...
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Surprise, Surprise
Wednesday May 9, 2012 | Peter Klein

When over the weekend the media began breathlessly repeating claims from unnamed intelligence officials that the CIA had foiled a deadly terrorist plot, I immediately suspected this would turn out like all the other cases, in which the episode is at least partly manufactured by some intelligence agency then used to demonstrate the need...
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TSA’s Total Stupidity Agency Enters the Life-threatening Realm
Tuesday May 8, 2012 | Mary Theroux

It’s not enough, apparently, that the TSA has a well-established record for humiliating, degrading, stealing from, bullying, and terrifying the traveling public. Its agents’ arrogance is now moving into the realm of actually life-threatening. A Type-1 diabetic teen’s insulin pump was broken by a TSA scanner, despite her showing a TSA agent her pump...
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Reason for Slow Recovery: Bad Government
Wednesday May 16, 2012 | John C. Goodman

Here is Gary Becker: While slow recoveries from major financial crises are common, employment would have increased considerably more rapidly, and unemployment would have fallen much faster, were it not for several factors special to this recovery. Scott Baker, Nicholas Bloom and Steven Davis have studied changes in economic policy uncertainty since 1985, and have...
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Hail Emperor Reich
Tuesday May 15, 2012 | Burt Abrams

Will Rogers claimed to have never met a man that he didn’t like. I’m consistent too. I never read anything by Robert Reich that I liked. Dr. Reich, former Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton and currently a named professor at UC Berkeley, is at it again. In writing for the U.K.’s The Guardian,...
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The Impotence of Stimulus Spending
Tuesday May 15, 2012 | Craig Eyermann

By now, pretty much everybody knows that President Obama’s economic stimulus program, more formally known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, has turned out to be an extremely expensive failure. Instead of creating or saving millions of jobs, this massive economic stimulus program really represented the federal government’s wasteful spending at...
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Where Did The Stimulus Money Go?
Monday May 14, 2012 | John C. Goodman

Stimulus money didn’t go to the states hardest hit by the recession. States with higher bankruptcy, foreclosure and poverty rates as well as lower incomes got significantly less money. And states that had higher unemployment rates received virtually exactly the same amount of money as states with lower rates. But there was one group that significantly benefited:...
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“The Life of Julia” Promotes a Lifetime of Dependency
Wednesday May 9, 2012 | Stephanie Freedman

“The Life of Julia” is an interactive slideshow from Barack Obama’s reelection campaign that portrays a woman living her whole life reliant on government programs. In so doing, it inadvertently exposes the cyclical effect that government “help” can produce. Meet Julia, a girl who is automatically put into the system by being placed in...
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Changing the Rules of Welfare
Monday May 7, 2012 | Craig Eyermann

How can changing the rules by which welfare benefits are doled out save taxpayer dollars while making sure that only the people who are eligible for welfare benefits can receive them? It’s a trick question, because the key to making it work is to make the bureaucrats who operate the federal government’s welfare dispensing...
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Take the National Debt Road Trip!
Thursday May 3, 2012 | Craig Eyermann

What if the President of the United States was the driver of a car, and the speed at which he drove was the rate at which the U.S. national debt would increase while he was at the wheel? Would that be the kind of road trip you’d like to go on? Courtesy of the...
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