Friend and fellow Memphian Kevin Perk sent me a picture of the sign outside the local hall of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. The sign reads:
Middle Class economies don’t just happen. They are union made.
Briefly, no: as I wrote last week, this is one of the enduring myths of American economic history.
For some time, I have been a proud member of the fuddy duddies who have been predicting the return of serious stagflation.
Firms have lots of cash on their balance sheet and it’s not earning anything. What to do? Buy the competition.
Economists Fryer and Sacerdote estimate that each additional job cost as much as $400,000
NBER Working Paper No. w16759
JAMES FEYRER, Dartmouth College BRUCE SACERDOTE, Dartmouth College
The Democrats are having fun at Republican expense over the alleged GOP mishandling of a bill that would extend the police-state provisions of the Patriot Act. The leadership figured it was a no-brainer. Aren’t we for law enforcement and against crime? The rank-and-file knew better than refused to go along. And the bill went down to defeat What’s going on here is not a “mishandling” but an ideological split between libertarian impulses and authoritarian ones.
[An MP3 audio file of this article, read by Steven Ng, is available for download.]
