The tax bills of many American families are falling during a period of exorbitant increases in federal spending due mainly to war. Odd? Not once we discover the record levels of government debt accumulation. It's the shell game of government finance at work. It is not the first time that government warriors have turned to debt and the printing press to pay for their military ventures.
In one democracy you vote but every other year for candidates (who may not win) to "represent" you and many others indirectly on myriad issues. In the other, you vote daily, often, directly, for specific vendors, goods, or services, in an endless plebiscite going on every minute of every day, with dollars as ballots.
The NBER says the recession ended 20 months ago, but where is the recovery? The labor market is not responding, and growth is weak and ambiguous. Christopher Westley offers an explanation of why this supposed recovery looks different from previous ones.
The previous foam used to insulate the Columbia's external fuel tanks contained Freon, which is a chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) that the EPA banned because of the ozone depletion scare. The wreck of the Columbia was almost certainly due to a chunk of insulating foam coming loose and hitting some heat-protecting tiles, scattering them and leaving the spacecraft vulnerable to the intense heat.
If you are preparing to fire someone on grounds that he or she is dangerous, you had better have darn good legal counsel! Chances are you will be sued. Chances are that you will have to settle either with a large cash payment or go to court. In either case, you will have expended massive resources just to do what the free enterprise system should guarantee in the first place: the right to hire and free.
You buy a stock and the price goes down. Who accepts the liability for losses? The purchaser of stock, of course, who must always bear in mind that stocks are never foreordained to go up or down. As painful as they are, investment losses are necessary to work off the excesses of a bubble, and to re-allocate capital to more promising business ventures.
Those of us who know some economics are used to wincing when the typical clergyman makes a pronouncement on political economy. So it comes as a bit of a shock to read Late Medieval religious figures, avowedly concerned with justice and morality, and find that not only are they economically literate but that in many cases their economic theory was far more advanced than many professional economists who came after them.
Why has the Concorde failed? The market determines whether and to what extent certain services such as speed are desired by society relative to competing demands on resources. No one can say a priori that faster is always and everywhere better. It may need to take a back seat to other priorities, like cheap tickets or mass availability or frequency of travel opportunities.
Closely linked to the issue of gay marriage is the issue of gay adoption. The subject raises the stakes in the current national controversy, and, as usual, state intervention complicates the picture enormously.
Gregory Bresiger tells the tale of how he was officially terminated: "How was I killed off at a relatively young age—well, 50 really doesn't seem that old today—and then miraculously raised from the dead by these mail carrying ghouls? Well, how does anything work in the federal government? It's difficult to explain. I'll give it my best shot."
