Lawrence Kudlow makes a good case that we should not close the borders. He hopes – as do I – that Mexico can foster its own economic development. After all, the CIA’s World Factbook reports Mexico’s per capita GDP at only $10,000. But he loses me with the following: When Fox took Mexico’s helm six […]
I’d like to get back to a problem that I was writing about last week: the possibility of using a value-added tax (VAT) to fix the “on-budget” federal budget deficit. That deficit, which excludes the Social Security trust fund (which will run a modest but declining surplus), is likely to be in the neighborhood of […]
Mickey Kaus thinks so: Earned Income Tax Credit does send cash to low income earners, but again you need to earn at least some money to get it. And it’s already pretty big. We probably can’t increase it much higher without running into cost and disincentive problems when the credit is phased out in the […]
Anthony Zinni co-authored Battle Ready with Tom Clancy and served in the Marines from the 1960’s to 2000. From 1997 to 2000, General Zinni was Commander in Chief of CENTCOM. Zinni is also a conservative Republican. Given his expertise, one would have thought President Bush would have heeded Zinni’s counsel not to invade Iraq. Zinni […]
The Census Bureau reported a sharp rise in U.S. construction spending in February led by private residential construction spending. Private residential spending increased to a record $665.7 Billion in February (SA, annual rate), 1.3% above the revised January estimate. The first graph shows private U.S. construction spending for single family homes since 1993. All numbers […]
Max Sawicky is having some fun at the expense of George Will and Robert Novak. Novak writes: James E. Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, has been telling the world that story for many years … Roy Spencer, a research scientist for the University of Alabama in Huntsville who disagrees with Hansen’s […]
It seems that Josh Bolton and I agree on one thing – but for very different reasons. We both want John Snow to resign from the position of Treasury Secretary: Joshua Bolten, the incoming White House chief of staff, wants Treasury Secretary John Snow replaced with someone who can present the administration’s message more forcefully […]
Interest rates continue their climb… and long rates have risen by enough in recent weeks (today they’re roughly at their highest levels since mid-2002) to shut down discussion of the “inverted yield curve”, at least temporarily. This raises a good question: is it more contractionary for the economy (or less expanionary, depending on how you […]
Well, I could have saved myself and all of you a lot of time and energy if I had just started off the week linking to Max Sawicky on the topic of immigration. The post would have been entitled “Immigration: Just See Max.” In one concise post, he made all of the points on immigration […]
David Altig says yes. He also reviews a recent paper by Stephanie Aaronson, Bruce Fallick, Andrew Figura, Jonathan Pingle and William Wascher entitled The Recent Decline in Labor Force Participation and its Implications for Potential Labor Supply that gives evidence that David may have a point. David cites a couple of paragraphs that might support […]