All Posts Tagged With: "unemployment"

Producing Jobs: Thoughts on Obama’s Plan for Small Businesses

The ears of small business America must have perked up when President Obama spoke about that critically important sector in his State of the Union address. Mine certainly did. Here’s when it really got interesting: “I’m . . . proposing a new small business tax credit—one that will go to over one million small businesses [...]

20May2010 | | 2 comments | Continued

Comparing the Great Depression to the Great Recession

President Obama has often remarked that the Great Recession (2008–10) is the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression. It’s interesting to study the many parallels between the Great Recession and the Great Depression. Causation. The main causes of both crises lie in actions of the federal government. In the case of the Great Depression, [...]

20May2010 | | 59 comments | Continued

Must We Live in Long-Term Recession?

There is an alternative, one that will lead to economic recovery, more wealth, and higher living standards.

24Feb2010 | | 11 comments | Continued

Where the Jobs Are

Robert Higgs, editor of The Independent Review and a Freeman columnist, has a revealing article on today’s employment and unemployment. Juicy tidbit: Total employment peaked in 2007 at 137.6 million persons on nonfarm payrolls, fell slightly in 2008, and then dropped precipitously in 2009 to 132.0 persons, for a two-year loss of 5.6 million jobs. [...]

12Jan2010 | | 1 comment | Continued

TGIF: Snow Job Summit

What are the odds that yesterday’s White House jobs summit will lead to the creation of any real jobs? The summit was based on the magic theory of government: Say the right incantations and reality will be reshaped according to one’s desires. There are no economic laws. There is only will. If we all think [...]

4Dec2009 | | 0 comments | Continued

Snow Job Summit

What are the odds that yesterday’s White House jobs summit will lead to the creation of any real jobs? The summit was based on the magic theory of government: Say the right incantations and reality will be reshaped according to one’s desires. There are no economic laws. There is only will. If we all think [...]

4Dec2009 | | 11 comments | Continued

Old, Bold Futility

In economic analysis and policy formulation, profundity is not to be confused with complexity. And simple logic is not the same as simplicity. Reliance in thought and communication on shortcut slogans and mottos yields not solution but fiasco. With employment slumping, many would have us believe in a simplistic “bold economic recovery program.” With vast [...]

23Oct2009 | | 1 comment | Continued

President Obama Appears in George Lopez Promo

I saw this for the first time last night. Given the 9.5 percent unemployment rate, the President doing commercials for late night TV shows incredibly poor taste. Of course, Lopez did endorse Obama during the campaign, so payback was due.

3Sep2009 | | 9 comments | Continued

Think of a Number: A Theory of Rational Forecasting

We don’t know how many blood-curdling economic forecasts are the result of career planning rather than sincere professional conviction. What we do know, though, is that such forecasts are the best method of deepening the gloom, frightening the credulous, and making the worst more probable.

21May2009 | | 0 comments | Continued

The Myth of Public Works as an Economic Stimulus

Words to ponder as the stimulus bill snakes through Congress: While we have legitimate infrastructure needs, public-works spending historically has been too slow, has delayed private and local government spending, and created few jobs for the unemployed. The programs are not labor-intensive and require skills few unemployed have. Public works did not end the Great [...]

23Jan2009 | | 0 comments | Continued

The Great Escape from the Great Depression

Questions about the Great Depression may be usefully framed as pertaining to three distinct issues: the Great Contraction, the extraordinarily severe economic decline from 1929 to 1933; the Great Duration, the persistence of subpar economic performance for more than a decade; and the Great Escape, the ultimate recovery from this uniquely deep and long depression. [...]

1Oct2008 | | 6 comments | Continued

A Sennholz Sampler

Editor’s Note: Hans Sennholz, a former president and trustee of FEE and long-time chairman of the economics department at Grove City College, died in June at age 85. We honor his memory with three of the many articles he contributed over the years. “Jobs and Trade,” July 1996 Unemployment is the great puzzle of our [...]

1Jun2007 | | 0 comments | Continued

Minimum Wage, Maximum Folly

The big Associated Press story for last October 11 was that “More than 650 economists, including five winners of the Nobel Prize for economics, called Wednesday for an increase in the minimum wage, saying the value of the last increase, in 1997, has been ‘fully eroded.’ ” Among these economists were Nobel laureates such as [...]

1Mar2007 | | 0 comments | Continued

Europe: Still a Laggard Economy

There have been increasing signs of optimism from European economy watchers. After some years in the doldrums, with slow growth and rising unemployment, things appear to be looking up: labor markets are more efficient; growth was good for 2006; and the euro is doing well against the dollar after years of weakness following its inception [...]

1Mar2007 | | 0 comments | Continued

Milton Friedman (1912-2006)

Milton Friedman, who died last month at age 94, was one of the twentieth century’s most influential champions of individual liberty and free markets. The 1976 winner of the Nobel Prize in economics and an early associate of FEE, Friedman did more than any single person in our time to teach the public the merits [...]

1Dec2006 | | 4 comments | Continued

What Is Going on in France?

Pierre Garello is a professor of economics at Aix-Marseille University, France. It is sometime painful for a liberal—I will be using that word in its old, continental, sense—to live in France, especially in southern France: so much light, so many beauties given by nature, and at the same time so much wealth wasted! Riots; strikes; blockage [...]

1Oct2006 | | 0 comments | Continued

We Need Multimedia Economics Teaching

Earlier this year I was invited to give a talk at an art gallery in Georgetown, the posh area of Washington, D.C., down the street from the White House, abutting the Potomac River. I confess this doesn’t happen to me very often. Okay, I exaggerate—it never happens to me. This was my first invitation ever [...]

1Oct2006 | | 1 comment | Continued
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