Quantitative Easing and Its Effects
Federal Reserve Building, Washington DC Photo Credit: Flickr.com/wwarby Despite its impact on our economic well-being, few people seem to know much about Quantitative Easing (QE). QE was a … Read More
Category: Economic Issues
Ideas about how an economy works. Organized ideologies about economies go by names like Keynesianism, neoclassical economics, socialism, etc., etc.
The Ideal Tax Regime – 2
In the last post on tax policy I suggested six attributes the ideal federal or state income tax regime should have. I reproduce them below. Taxes should not favor some … Read More
Monetary News from Jackson Hole
Grand Tetons at Jackson Hole, Wyoming Photo Credit: Freeimage.com/Jack Sanders A lot of vital news for the economy came out of two gatherings at Jackson Hole, Wyoming last weekend. … Read More
The Ideal Tax Regime – 1
Taxes are nothing but destructive to all parts of society with the exception of government and its employees. Unless you are obscenely rich or abjectly poor, you probably have your … Read More
Federal Budget Deficits and Spending Restraints
Budget Stops Growing! Image Credit: International Liberty A tip of the hat to Dan Mitchell, who blogs on the website International Liberty! The motto for … Read More
The Morality of Wealth
Almost nothing divides the political Left from the Right more than their mutually exclusive views of wealth. Listen to President Obama, Senator Elizabeth Warren, Hillary Clinton, or Senator Bernie Sanders … Read More
Monetary Rules
Left to their own devices, the Federal Reserve’s Federal Open Market Committee will more often than not adopt a policy of “easy money”. Rather than adopting a monetary policy that … Read More
The Ideal Monetary Policy
Decade after decade, the Federal Reserve, under its dual statutory mandates to minimize both inflation and unemployment, has favored the attack on unemployment over that of inflation. Depending on the … Read More
Division in the Fed
Evidence of the division between those in the Fed who want tighter money and the Keynesians on the FOMC who want easy money to continue has just appeared. The vice … Read More
Bending History
We may be approaching in economics what Thomas Kuhn in his seminal book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (reference [S2]), called a paradigm shift. Kuhn laid out scientific history in … Read More
Why What Happens in China Matters
Last week for two straight days, China reminded us of how much we have shrunk as an economic power when they devalued their currency. The U.S. stock market promptly tanked. … Read More
Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand” and Evolution
I was inspired to write this post by a person named Cai in a comment on Clouds and Global Warming. Not that the suggestive part of Cai’s comment had anything to … Read More
Dialogues and Quora
I have just found a wonderful place on the internet at Quora.com for carrying on dialogues on serious subjects. Readers of this website will recall that inspiring such conversations was … Read More
Economic Effects of Current Tax Policy
One of the biggest sources of problems government imposes on individuals, businesses and the economy is taxes. It has truly been said that “the power to tax is the power … Read More
Collapsing Commodities Point To Hard Times
Lately there have been a number of blogs that have noticed the collapse in commodity prices, such as this one on businessinsider.com. Included in that post was a histogram display … Read More
Stock Market Continues Downward March
Have you been keeping track of our favorite canary-in-the-coal-mine for the economy? I refer to the current state of the stock market, of course. The last time we looked at … Read More
OMG!! This Economy Has Been Even Worse Than We Thought!
This morning the Wall Street Journal (access requires subscription), in an editorial entitled “The Six-Year Slough“, revealed that the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) has just released new, revised numbers on … Read More
The Complexity of Reality
How arrogant people are who think they understand enough about a nation’s economy that they can control it! This thought came to me while thinking about the implicit assumptions progressives make. … Read More
Progressives’ Basic Assumptions
The lady in the photo above, like most others in the conference I am attending, has a sunny, upbeat personality that takes anything that life offers in stride. The conference … Read More
Lessons of the “Great Recession” Not Learned
The Obama administration believes in its own propaganda. Believe it or not, the U.S. federal government is currently mandating the same kind of bad behavior that caused the 2007-2008 financial crisis. The … Read More
Current Economic Effects of the Federal Reserve
Having given the institutional composition and powers of the Federal Reserve, and having given our opinion on what it should be doing and why, we will now look at what it … Read More
In Which States Does $100 Buy The Most?
Last week on July 8 The Tax Foundation published a report entitled The Real Value of $100 in Each State. In their study they took data from The U.S. Bureau … Read More
Why Socialism Does Not Work
Typical grocery store queue in Vilnius, Lithuania, USSR in 1990. Note the bare shelves. Photo Credit: Reddit/HistoryPorn Yesterday I published a post in which I viewed with alarm the rise … Read More
The Evolution of Modern Economic Theory
In order to understand why the Federal Reserve has chosen its policies of the past three decades, we need to understand the New Keynesians. The response by neoclassical economists to the … Read More
The EPA, CO2, Mercury Emissions, and “Green” Energy
You no doubt heard last week that on June 29 the Supreme Court invalidated an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulation limiting emissions of mercury and some other pollutants from coal … Read More
The Federal Reserve and Monetarism
Once the basic institutional facts about the Federal Reserve System have been presented, any discussion of the Fed should begin with a discussion of monetarism. After all, the Fed’s primary … Read More
France in Distress
My sister-in-law has just sent us the URL of a truly amazing news video about France and the economic and social troubles it is undergoing. Click here to see it. … Read More
Economic Effects of the Dodd-Frank Act
The Dodd-Frank Act is the solution to a problem that does not exist, and is therefore totally unnecessary. The causes of the 2007-2008 financial crisis were not private sector greed … Read More
Causes of the 2007-2008 U.S. Financial Crisis
Although we discussed some of the reasons why the U.S. economy has not recovered very robustly from the 2007-2008 financial crisis, we have not looked at exactly why the crisis happened. … Read More
The Debilitating Effects of Obamacare
So now the Supreme Court has ruled that it does not matter what the plain language of a legislative bill is. They claim to be able to sense what the … Read More