Uncategorized

CBO Says $849 Billion Senate Health Care Bill Will Cut Deficit

“Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on Wednesday unveiled a sweeping health care bill that would expand health insurance coverage to 30 million more Americans at an estimated cost of $849 billion over 10 years. Reid and other Senate Democrats cited an analysis by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office for the coverage and cost figures. The [...]

19Nov2009 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | Continued

Administration Seeks Palatable Way to Continue TARP Bailout

“The Obama administration is poised to extend the life of the highly unpopular $700 billion financial bailout and, to display a commitment to fiscal responsibility, is planning to use much of the leftover funds to reduce the national debt, government sources said.” (Washington Post, Thursday)
Didn’t they borrow the TARP money?
FEE Timely Classic
“Our Presidents and the [...]

19Nov2009 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | Continued

Government Readies Plan to Seize “Too Big to Fail” Financial Companies

“Congress and the Obama administration are about to take up one of the most fundamental issues stemming from the near collapse of the financial system last year — how to deal with institutions that are so big that the government has no choice but to rescue them when they get in trouble. …The measure would [...]

26Oct2009 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | Continued

Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions

As the title suggests, Predictably Irrational is another offering on behavioral economics. The overriding theme is that people not only tend to behave irrationally, but they do so in systematic and predictable ways. Thus our lapses from rational behavior reinforce each other rather than cancelling out. The evidence for this comes largely from experiments which [...]

21May2009 | Dwight R. Lee | 1 comment | Continued

Global Warming Revisited

In the May 2001 Freeman I published “Unprecedented Global Warming?” which noted that climate change (global warming and global cooling) is a continuing phenomenon and that what we’ve witnessed in the last 25 years is “by no means unprecedented.” The Medieval Warm Period (800-1300), which took place without SUVs, power plants, or factories, was warmer [...]

24Apr2009 | Michael Heberling | 10 comments | Continued

The Trouble with Keynes

Keynesian theory implies an inherent instability in market economies. Thus the theory cannot possibly explain how a healthy market economy functions—how the market process allows one kind of activity to be traded off against the other.

1Apr2009 | Roger W. Garrison | 2 comments | Continued

A Microeconomist’s Protest

The conventional macroeconomic diagnosis and proposed cures ignore many important structural or microeconomic factors.

1Apr2009 | Mario Rizzo | 8 comments | Continued

Too Big to Succeed

One widely cited culprit for the 2008 financial crisis was a supposed decision by the U.S. government not to regulate a relatively new type of financial instrument known as a credit default swap (CDS). In fact, this so-called “failure to regulate” refers to regulations that prohibited public trading of these instruments, concentrated risk in a small number of large firms, and massively increased the probability of a financial disaster. To add to the irony, one of the government officials most responsible for these interventions, then-Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, recently apologized for having had too much faith in the free market when he should have apologized for not having had enough.

1Apr2009 | Less Antman | 2 comments | Continued

Globalization: Extending the Market and Human Well-Being

Much of the prosperity of today’s world arises from the division of labor. Globalization, by extending the market’s scope to the entire world, enables the division of labor to become as developed as the current world population allows. However, to be truly in the interests of consumers and a boon to economic prosperity, globalization needs to occur spontaneously through the workings of the unhampered free market. Government attempts to meddle with this process—even with the sincere intent to facilitate or accelerate it—will only undermine its efficacy at benefiting us all.

1Apr2009 | Gennady Stolyarov II | 0 comments | Continued