The Bureau of Economic Analysis released third-quarter gross domestic product numbers yesterday, and overall real growth at 3.5 percent was pretty good. But examining the components of GDP reveals a more disturbing picture. While consumption, exports, and the government sector were up, private investment has fallen through the floor. Figure 1 reveals a dramatic collapse of private investment over the last two years. [...]
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You might recall that a few weeks ago University of California at Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau co-authored a Washington Post op-ed calling on the federal government to provide direct support — meaning taxpayer dollars — to select public universities. Birgeneau decried decades of “material and progressive disinvestment by states in higher education,” despite, as I pointed [...]
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Over at Think Progress, Matt Yglesias takes me to task for saying that the so-called public option in the House’s health care bill “would all but eliminate private insurance and force millions of Americans into a government-run system.” Yglesias apparently still buys into the myth that the public option is, well, and option. For people [...]
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Though I hadn’t heard of it before, I was delighted to see a publication called VOIP News cite the Cato Institute as one of 15 “Greatest Enemies of Net Neutrality.” As VOIP News says, we are indeed a “voice of reason during political debates.” Alas, I’m selectively quoting. What they actually said, snidely, was that [...]
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Najim Abed al-Jabouri, former mayor of Tal Afar, has a piece in the Times that seems like cause for alarm: Both the military and the police remain heavily politicized. The police and border officials, for example, are largely answerable to the Interior Ministry, which has been seen (often correctly) as a pawn of Shiite political [...]
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This morning the National Center for Education Statistics released a new report, Mapping State Proficiency Standards Onto NAEP Scores: 2005-2007. What the results make clear (for about the billionth time) is that government control of education has put us on a road straight to failure. Still, many of those who insist on living in denial about constant government failure in [...]
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A Financial Super-Regulator: The dangers of giving the Fed too much power. The financial regulators’ pipe dream: “Most new regulation will do nothing to limit crises because markets will innovate around it. Worse, some regulation being considered by Congress will guarantee bigger and more frequent crises.” The shape of things to come? More war will [...]
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Illinois state senator James Meeks, an African American Democrat and long-time opponent of school choice, just switched sides. In doing so, he swells the small but growing ranks of Democrats in Florida, New Jersey, and the nation’s capital, among others, who support giving parents an easy choice between public and private schools. Like Wile E. [...]
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The bad news this morning on the impact of both the federal stimulus and the Cash for Clunkers program should not come as a surprise to anyone who has paid attention to the history of government intervention in the economy. New data that the jobs created by the stimulus have been overstated by thousands is [...]
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According to a Washington Post story today, “the weak dollar is one problem the United States loves to have.” The story reports how the fall of the dollar against the euro and other currencies in the past year has boosted U.S. exports and discouraged imports, cutting the trade deficit and allegedly boosting the U.S. economy. [...]
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