Economics

Center on Wealth & Poverty

Consent of the Governed

If I told you the world is becoming both more and less democratic at the same time, you might reply, “how can that be?”. Follow along and you shall see. Do you believe “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed?” It is not just the overwhelming majority of Americans who believe in Read More ›

Taxes, Truth and CBS

How do you think the sanctimonious people at TV’s “60 Minutes” would portray a company charged by the FCC with “serious indecency violations,” that made expensive settlements with employees and others because of injuries related to asbestos and other hazardous material exposures, underfunded its employee pension, is legally accused of securities violations, employs those who widely distributed forged documents in Read More ›

It Fuels a Debate, Too

William Tucker is a Senior Fellow of Discovery Institute If there is a true difference of opinion in the current presidential race, it is over whether we can achieve independence from foreign oil, especially Persian Gulf oil. “I want an America that relies on its own ingenuity and innovation — not the Saudi royal family.” So said John Kerry at Read More ›

Out to Lunch at Treasury?

If the major departments of government were baseball teams, the Treasury Department would be the New York Yankees. Historically, from the time of Alexander Hamilton, most of the best and brightest in government were in Treasury. Treasury was viewed as the class act. Treasury officials were treated with the respect that officials of HUD (Housing and Urban Development) could only Read More ›

Wealth Creators vs. Protectors

A major reason the liberal elites so hate President Bush is the policies he pushes will reduce their power and influence. Sens. John Kerry and Edward Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrats, claim they are the protectors of the little guy and the middle class. Yet their proposals are designed to protect the elite like themselves who inherited rather than created wealth. Much Read More ›

How to Find Osama

Having just finished reading the report of the September 11 commission, I was shocked; shocked to learn major U.S. government bureaucracies are incompetent. Washington being Washington, most of the solutions proposed revolved around reorganizing and creating more bureaucracies. It seems not to have occurred to anyone there are market solutions for many information problems the intelligence community faces. Two examples Read More ›

The Growth Agenda

Would you expand your stock market holdings if you knew taxes would be increased on businesses’ most valuable employees? Business depreciation allowances would be reduced? Tax disadvantages of U.S. multinational corporations would increase relative to their foreign competitors? And the tax rate on capital gains and dividends would rise? Well, this is exactly what John Kerry proposes, and that is Read More ›

Making the World Better

There are a lady barber and a finance minister, both of whom, in very different ways, are making their homelands better, in part, because of their American experience. It has long been recognized the remittances foreign workers send to their homelands dwarf official foreign aid in both size and effectiveness. What is often not recognized is how foreign visitors and Read More ›

John Edwards and the Damsel in Distress

IF YOU WANT TO UNDERSTAND trial lawyers like John Edwards, you have to recognize their one enduring fantasy. They are knights in shining armor rescuing damsels in distress. They’ll tell you they’re “standing up for the little guy” or “enforcing the Constitution” or “sending a message” or “teaching the big guys a lesson.” But at bottom there’s always that one Read More ›

The Ideal

Is it possible, within our children’s lifetimes, to have a world where war and state sponsored terrorism is very remote? The answer is not only yes, but we are much closer to that ideal than most people think. A truly peaceful world can only be and will be a world where virtually everyone lives under a regime reasonably close to Read More ›