The Unbroken Window

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It is an oft repeated canard that the “American economy is not working for the vast majority of middle and lower-income Americans.”  What follows from this are recommendations that have vitually nothing to do with making it work better for these people, but are elaborate schemes to get politicians re-elected, to cater to powerful interest […]

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The store management’s fears were well founded. When consumers knew just how much more taxes would cost them, they reduced their purchases of the items by about 7 percent. As part of the working paper-titled “Salience and Taxation: Theory and Evidence,” coauthored by Adam Looney of the Federal Reserve Board and Kory Kroft of Berkeley’s […]

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How many of you are factoring in Social Security income in your retirement plans? My family is expecting zilch, and we are saving accordingly. I would gladly argue that the Ponzi scheme known as “Social Security” has little chance of being anything near useful by the time Gen X (or is it Y … which […]

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it seems that the growth of the Sunbelt has little to do with the sun.

That is Ed Glaeser and Kristina Tobio in the latest Southern Economic Journal. Having lived in Massachusetts, New York and Kentucky that statement is completely unsurprising, despite what grumpy Northerners would tell you.

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For the past three years, delinquency rates on the oh-so-safe mortgages insured by the FHA have consistently been higher than even those of the dreaded subprime mortgages. In the last quarter of 2006, for instance, the delinquency rate for subprimes had increased to 13.33% in the National Delinquency Survey compiled by the Mortgage Bankers Association. […]

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The Mormons have it.  I first heard about it from this excellent tome.

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Thirty percent of Gross Domestic Product will be extracted as tribute by Federal, state and local governments this year. This burden merely scratches the surface of the full-costs associated with administering American government.
Opponents of ratification of the U.S. Constitution by the Pennsylvania Convention in 1787 wrote that, “By virtue of their power of taxation, […]

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August marked the ten year anniversary of the latest alteration to the welfare system. The major change enacted was the substitution of federally managed entitlement cash grants (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) with a federally-funded state-run program of cash grants conditional on work requirements and participation limits (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families).
Predictably caseloads dramatically […]

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