Nearly 92% of economists surveyed this week by the Wall Street Journal expect that our eight-year experiment with unprecedented monetary easing from the Federal Reserve will come to an end at the next Fed meeting in December. Since we have had the monetary wind at our back for so many years, at least a few have begun to question our ability to make economic and financial gains against actual headwinds. But in reality, the tightening cycle that the forecasters are waiting for actually started las... (more)
A painful exchange with a young student who's organizing for free public colleges, cancellation of all student debt and $15/hour minimum wage for all campus employees. She doesn't really know how to pay for it, unfortunately.
All over America, the middle class is dying and poverty is on the rise. One of the primary reasons for this is the rapidly rising cost of living in the United States. The cost of just about everything that average families shell out money for on a regular basis – food, rent, health insurance, etc. – is rising much faster than wages are. In a previous art... (more)
Tons of people seem (quite rightly) concerned about the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement. As we pointed out last week after the final text was finally, released, the agreement has a lot of really big problems. But if you want to understand just how bad the agreement is, perhaps you should just look at the industries that like it. Vox notes that Big Pharma and... (more)
Do women make 77 cents on the dollar? Should there be a law to fix it? Do you hate women? Remember, Men working = Wage Slavery - Women Working = Liberation
Why won't the American people listen to the warnings? David Stockman was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1977 to 1981, and he served as the Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan from 1981 to 1985. These days, he is running a website called "Contra Corner" which I highly recommend that you check out. Stockman believes that a global "debt super-cycle" that has been building for decades is now bursting, and he is convinced that t... (more)
Most economists and investors readily acknowledge that the current period of central bank activism, characterized by extended bouts of quantitative easing and zero percent interest rates, is a newly-blazed trail in economic history. And while these policies strike some as counterintuitive, open-ended, and unimaginably expensive, most express comfort that our extremely educated, data-dependent, central bankers have a pretty good idea as to where the trail is going and how to keep the wagons toget... (more)
This morning, I saw a TV ad for Lasik eye surgery and that got me wondering, “What’s happened to the price of Lasik since I had my procedure 10 years ago?” We hear a lot about the rising cost of healthcare. (By the way, how is that Obamacare working out for you?) But, what about medical procedures that patients pay for themselves? And so I called the ophthalmologist who performed my Lasik operation (with superb results, I might add) to find out the details.
Scarcity of resources exists in many forms and is the problem in economics. If resources were not scarce, there would be no need to economize. The existence of scarcity is true of all resources (such as time, human energy, and natural resources). However, it is not necessarily intuitive that allowing scarce resources to be owned privately is the solution to this problem.
Consequently, socialism appears attractive to many and they turn to having all resources owned collectively for... (more)
This was the most radical statement in the entirety of last night's republican debate, yet the media has completely ignored it.
Ben Carson said he was previously wrong on calling for subsidies for the oil industry to be shifted to ethanol producers, and said instead he now wants to get rid of ALL government subsidies, which would literally be ... (more)
1,426. That’s the number of Americans who renounced their US citizenship last quarter according to the US government’s report just released this morning.
That’s a record high for a single quarter, easily beating the last record high set earlier this year, which beat the previous record high set in 2013.
This is clearly a trend on the rise, and it certainly raises the question: why?
What is it about the United States that drives so many citizens to le... (more)
