Let me apologize for my hiatus last week; it was the result of a nasty virus that took me pretty much the entire week to recover from. At any rate, I find that my mood is not being improved by reading about the economic situation in Europe. And apparently I’m not alone in my disappointment. […]

It seems that Andrew Roth of the Club for Growth has an odd flair for the English language as he suggests that Bill Thomas is about to introduce a “MONSTER BILL”. Part of this bill seems to be the DeMint proposal to strip away the Social Security surplus, which will make the unified deficit as […]

The latest Harris Poll is out, courtesy of the WSJ (subscription): The poll also reports that in answer to the question, “How would you rate the job President George W. Bush is doing as president – excellent, pretty good, only fair, or poor?”, 45% responded with either “excellent” or “pretty good” while 55% answered negatively […]

The bubble discourse has reached record decibel levels this week as an unprecedented barrage of mainstream housing related articles hit the newsstands. Measured with internet searches for “real estate bubble” and “housing bubble”, bubble interest has soared: The market share of these terms across all major search engines like Google, Yahoo! Search, MSN Search and […]

This op-ed is a collection of the worst arguments I’ve read on this issue. Comparing the woes of PBGC to whether we know how to reasonably forecast the future cash flows of the Social Security Trust Fund fails to grasp the moral hazard issues involves when companies fund private defined benefits plans. Flemming v. Nestor […]

Rick Santorum and Lindsey Graham plan to join James DeMint to propose that we place the Social Security surpluses into personal retirement accounts. Steve Soto provides a very nice discussion of this “new approach”. All I can add is the observation that we have seen this tired old proposal many times.

AB reader Homer Simpson recently suggested we check out We Need a Bigger Budget Deficit by William Vickrey (1914-1996). Vickrey’s writings included Agenda for Progressive Taxation (his dissertation) and Public Economics (Cambridge University Press, 1994). Vickrey and James Mirlees were awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1996 for their contributions to the theory […]

Joel Kurtzman begins his case for a strong dollar with: Since 1971, the dollar has had no real-world backing other than the level of confidence the rest of the world puts in the United States and in its future. As I thought he might be about to make a case for a return to the […]

Is the title of the latest from Jack Kemp: The historical record couldn’t be clearer. The Kennedy tax-rate reductions that triggered the prosperity of the 1960s and produced a windfall of government revenues indeed ended up helping balance the budget in 1964-65. Federal revenues doubled in the 1980s as a result of the Reagan tax-rate […]

The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by John Maynard Keynes was labeled one of the ten most harmful books over the past two centuries by this group of folks who likely never read the book. Yet, its core thesis that an economy can fall below full employment has certainly received a lot of […]