Center on Wealth & Poverty
The computer age is over. After a cataclysmic global run of thirty years, it has given birth to the age of the telecosm — the world enabled and defined by new communications technology. Chips and software will continue to make great contributions to our lives, but the action is elsewhere. To seek the key to great wealth and to understand Read More ›
Social Security reform as a political issue was verboten just 10 years ago. No presidential hopeful in his right mind would broach that subject. Now though, the debate is not about whether to reform Social Security, but about how to reform Social Security. Makes you wonder: Just what has happened to finally make discussion of Social Security reform acceptable dinner-table Read More ›
Earlier this month, President Clinton vetoed legislation to end the marriage penalty in the federal tax code, charging that the Republican-backed bill was “poorly targeted toward delivering marriage penalty relief.” News reports filed by the Associated Press (AP) backed the President’s assertion, claiming that only some married couples in America are penalized by the current tax code. Many other couples, Read More ›
Vice President Gore keeps telling us how proud he is that he voted against the Reagan tax rate reductions in 1981. This is a curious boast for a politician to make since, a year after the tax cuts went into effect, inflation and unemployment fell sharply and the economy began to grow very rapidly. Most observers credit the Reagan tax Read More ›
C-SPAN has just released its rankings of American presidents. Several dozen notable historians and professional observers of the presidency were surveyed and asked to rank the presidents in 10 different categories. Most of the categories are somewhat subjective, such as “moral authority” and “pursued equal justice for all.” One category, however, “economic management,” can be analyzed empirically. Numbers are available Read More ›
What do the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, the global warming treaty in Kyoto, and the Social Security “crisis” of demand-side Keynesian economics have in common, apart from a convergence of K’s? You can even add Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber. Answer: They all reflect a belief in a zero-sum world. The concept of a zero-sum system originated in a branch of Read More ›
Finally, a Gilder book for those of us who want to get right to the point! From tapes, transcripts, and corporate conclaves, you get the spoken wit and wisdom of George Gilder — on money and morals, technology and telecom. It’s all here, and it’s easy to use. A little over a third of Speaking of George Gilder consists of speeches and Read More ›
Published on May 1, 1991, Centesimus Annus returns to the themes of a lapidary encyclical of 100 years before, Rerum Novarum, which refuted Marxism long before it had refracted into a global plague of tyranny and murder. The critique of socialism, however, did not signify an affirmation of capitalism. The `new things’ to which the Pope devoted his attention more Read More ›