Wealth & Poverty Review

Microsoft recently announced an unprecedented three-year, $500 million investment to spur housing development across the Puget Sound region. Since 2011, strong economic growth in the Seattle metro area has boosted overall jobs by 21 percent, but the housing stock has expanded only 13 percent, leading to a massive increase in rental and home prices. It’s a problem reaching crisis levels in all West Coast tech cities. Microsoft plans to devote half the investment—$250 million—to pay for market-rate loans to support low-income housing. Another $225 million will go to preservation and construction of middle-income housing in the cities surrounding the company’s Redmond campus, and $25 million will go toward addressing homelessness. Overall, Microsoft hopes to leverage these funds to create “tens …

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 ›

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 ›