Wealth and Poverty Review
Trump Calls for a Reform of Perverse Welfare System. Media (Mostly) Ignore It
On Tuesday, President Trump issued an executive order calling on secretaries in eight federal departments to work on reforming their bloated welfare bureaucracies. They are to spend the next month looking for ways to fix the programs under their charge, and report back. You can be forgiven if you didn’t hear about this. Insofar as the media covered it, they mostly painted Trump as a mean old rich guy who doesn’t care about the poor. Check out this “explainer” piece at Vox for one example. In truth, this move is Trump at his best. Reversing Obama But what can he do by way of executive order? Quite a lot as it turns out. President Obama spent his two terms gutting the Welfare Reform Act of Read More ›
A Lively Discussion on Trade and Protectionism
This will go down in history as the episode of “The Bill Walton Show” where economist John Tamny referred to views I presented as utter nonsense and I called his naïve. No, we haven’t descended into a late-night cable TV news catfight. Anyone who has watched this program for any time knows I could not have more respect for Tamny, a senior fellow in economics at Reason Foundation, and his unique insights into economics, trade, and policy—and that he’s one of my favorite people. But the language we both chose in what was an entirely pleasant conversation perhaps reflects the sharp differences that are emerging even on the pro-market side about the trade practices of President Donald Trump. I had Read More ›
George Gilder and Hance Haney with Bill Walton on Block Chain Technology
George Gilder, perhaps the leading futurist of our day, predicted the rise of the Internet, the decline of television and the explosion of the smartphone. Now he’s predicting another giant step forward – an innovation potentially as consequential as the Internet itself. It is called blockchain technology, and it has begun to challenge the way we buy and sell things. View or listen now on The Bill Walton Show.
Democracy’s Highest Crime and Misdemeanor
In his Gettysburg Address, Lincoln reminded Americans that they were uniquely privileged to have a new birth of freedom that was contingent on “government of the people, by the people, and for the people.” That was then. What about now? (more…)
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