Like a proud father I would like to announce to the world that both Chris Coyne and Pete Leeson successfully defended their PhD theses yesterday and have now joined the ranks of PhD economists. (Mises.org readers know the names Leeson and Coyne well.)

“Red light cameras do not increase safety,” says Eric Scrum with the National Motorists Association. “Quite frankly, they are not a solution in any shape or form.”

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Studies by the Federal Highway Administration show right angle crashes decreased by 25 to 30 percent, but rear-end crashes increased by about 15 percent.

Here.

In the WSJ: “So far in 2005, 33% of the 18 withdrawn stock offerings -- including IPOs, secondary offerings and convertible-stock deals -- were put on ice because the issuers began discussions to be acquired instead, according to data from deal tracker Dealogic. That rate is up from 2004, when 18% of the 97 withdrawn deals were due to acquisition discussions, and 2003, when 16% of 67 deals were pulled for that reason, says Dealogic.”

Yesterday’s Las Vegas Sun carried an article on Carol Harter’s statement that the university has dropped its case against Hans-Hermann Hoppe.

Thanks to Kevin Johnson for the link. Apparently, the French are very worried about the oncoming attack of American ideas. Google is planning on uploading libraries to the internet. Jeanneney, head of France’s national library, is worried that Google will favor books written in English, and tend to be Americanized.

I recently discovered Nouriel Roubini’s Global Macroeconomic and Financial Policy Site, an invaluable source of research on the dollar and the international financial system. Roubini is an economics professor at NYU who write s prolifically on monetary and financial topics.

You know those tax cuts you barely saw a couple of years ago? They will soon be eaten up by the Alternative Minimum Tax. Not only that: your taxes could go much higher as this non-inflation-adjusted mechanism eats up ever more of your deductions.

Here is an amusing article where Larry Kudlow (correctly) advises Bush that an increase in the Social Security payroll cap is a tax increase, just as surely as an increase in the rate. (Bush’s people had denied this.) But what’s really funny is Kudlow’s incredulity that W. would go back on his word: