Center on Wealth & Poverty
Your “Debt and Growth” editorial (April 30) defending the Ken Rogoff-Carmen Reinhart thesis that the growth trajectory of U.S. debt comes with significant risk and curtailed economic growth is well-reasoned in the midst of contrary assertions by Paul Krugman and a myriad of Keynesians that an error in a Rogoff-Reinhart spreadsheet discredits their monumental book “This Time is Different.” That Read More ›
U.S. stock prices have just reached record highs, erasing the losses since the previous 2007 peak. But the U.S. economy as measured by the labor-force participation rate, which captures the percentage of working-age people in the labor force, has just dropped to a new 34-year low of 63.3 percent. Since the Great Depression, recessions have always been followed by strong Read More ›
Crime has been in decline — but current government policies are bound to reverse this trend. Against the backdrop of sluggish growth and high unemployment, one bright spot has been declining crime rates, with levels in the United States now about half what they were 20 years ago. This gradual decline holds true even in the perennially high-risk demographic of Read More ›
The recent release of the Federal Reserve’s minutes from meetings in the fourth quarter of 2007 reveal how little the Bernanke Fed understood before the 2008 financial collapse. Similarly, the Greenspan Fed failed to grasp the risks that led to the earlier stock exchange and housing bubbles bursting. John Taylor makes a similar point (“Fed Policy Is a Drag on Read More ›
Pre-eminent political/economic author George Gilder thinks “fiscal cliff” is the wrong term to describe what the country faces. It’s actually a “fiscal swamp,” and it’s President Barack Obama who has filled that swamp, Gilder tells Newsmax TV in an exclusive interview. As for the morass, “we’re in a fiscal swamp today that leads into the future as long as you Read More ›
It’s unsettling that Washington has become so much more cavalier in the treatment of budgets and numbers than is the case in the private sector. Any business or family household knows that revenue intake has to offset spending over the long run in order to carry on and remain viable. Yet many in Washington ignore or deny the requirements of Read More ›
Ulterior Motives in the DOJ Suit against S&P? What has been distinct about Barack Obama’s presidency is his inclination to operate in continuous campaign mode, to deflect attention away from his policy failures and to undermine opposition by politicizing the issues and policy responses he chooses to take up. So now with the president’s attorney general Eric Holder having just Read More ›
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Link to Original Article The fiscal cliff is a less a crisis than a creation that diverts the attention of policymakers, the media and the public away from the big picture abyss that threatens the United States and shifts focus to the smaller and more immediate tax and spending debate associated with the year-end expiration of the Bush tax cuts. Read More ›
If Harry Truman and Jack Kennedy were somehow resurrected and transported in time to the present, they would not recognize today’s Democratic Party in comparison to the one which raised them up as successful presidents in earlier times. The two major political parties in the U.S. have always been fundamentally different. The Republican Party has been rooted in transcendent values and Read More ›