A cartoon, like a picture, is worth a thousand words. Nonetheless, I’ll risk adding a few more to this one. In case you haven’t heard, French economist Thomas Piketty’s book, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” is a runaway best seller. In Professor Piketty’s view, under capitalism, the rich get richer (because they own the…
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Obamacare, so says the Congressional Budget Office, will lead some 2.5 million workers to drop out of the labor force. But the White House sees the silver lining: “Over the longer run, CBO finds that because of this law [Obamacare], individuals will be empowered to make choices about their own lives and livelihoods like…
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The Urban Dictionary defines busybody as… “the kind of person you just want to punch in the mouth for being so damb [sic] annoying. They have no life and way too much time on their hands. They frequently use their excessive amount of time to annoy and monitor others, taddletale [sic] for small meaningless…
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China Daily, China’s English language newspaper, is not the most objective of sources, but a pairing of recent headlines on October 3 tells much. “Xi [China’s President] pledges to boost ties with Indonesia. Countries ink deals on fisheries, defense as well as aerospace,” was next to “Obama cancels trip to Malaysia. U.S. President trims…
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There are so many problems raised by Obamacare that one wonders if it was designed deliberately to fail. You don’t need a course in economics to have predicted two of the biggest problems: 1) the provision requiring any employer with 50 or more employees to provide healthcare. This has spawned an epidemic of companies called “49ers” with 49 or fewer employees; and,…
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Once upon a time in a far off land, a beautiful flower was discovered. Its bulbs became highly prized and their prices rose steadily. Word of the rising prices for the bulbs spread across the land and virtually everyone, rich and poor, began to buy bulbs for investment. The price of bulbs soared adding to the…
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Imagine the following scenario. Unemployment remains stubbornly high as the Chairman of the Federal Reserve enters the Oval Office. The President urges the Chairman to pump more money into the economy to stimulate economic growth before his reelection bid. The Chairman responds: “In my view, the monetary authority has laid the foundation for recovery. What is holding back the economy now is…
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In 2009, Keynesian economists in the Obama administration were downright giddy with excitement. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) passed by congress was the “biggest peacetime fiscal stimulus in U.S. history” that promised to return the economy to full employment in short order. The Act’s $787 billion (equivalent to about 5% of our national output) in…
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There are two disparate views of our large and growing public debt. Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman, in a recent International Herald Tribune editorial “Cheating America’s Children” (March 30-31, 2013), considers those who have been worrying about our burgeoning public debt as “Chicken Littles.” Chicken Little, you may recall, is hit in the head by an acorn and subsequently runs about…
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Ben Bernanke and his Federal Reserve Bank seem to be determined to reinflate the real estate bubble. Ben was blind-sided by the bursting of the bubble in 2006 as evidenced by his earlier CNBC interview: “Well, I guess I don’t buy your premise [that there is a real estate bubble]. It’s a pretty unlikely…
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