News
Washington Times | Parties clash at hearing to vet new consumer bureau chief nominee
Senate Republicans said Tuesday the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has too much unfettered power and President Obama’s choice to head the agency should not be approved.
CNN: Money | Infrastructure Bank: Fixing how we fix roads
The I-Bank, or infrastructure bank, has support of both Democrats, Republicans and big business. Legislation has been co-sponsored in the Senate by Democrat John Kerry of Massachusetts and Republican Kay Bailey Hutchinson of Texas.
Politico | America, 10 years after Sept. 11
A decade later, we are crippled by debt, depressed by a jobs crisis and drained by an endless war waged against an invisible enemy. Our president is ill-prepared and our Congress is incapable of grasping the great challenges that now confront us.
WSJ | CEOs Call for Less Regulation, Better Infrastructure
Chief executives of some of the world's largest companies would support a U.S. effort to update aging infrastructure, financed in part by private money, as a way to create jobs and make U.S. business more competitive.
Politico | No consensus on fixing housing woes
President Barack Obama and Congress are confronting a historic obstacle in their efforts to revive the stalled economy: a crippled housing market unlikely to rebound for several years.
Econ Comments
RCM | Gov. Perry and the 'Race to the Bottom' Myth
Gov. Rick Perry's entrance into the Republican presidential field has sparked intense debate on Texas' economic performance, including provocative claims that Perry and the state are engaging in a ‘race to the bottom' to attract jobs and people by keeping taxes and regulations low.
AEI: The American | Why I’m ‘Ginned Up’ about Regulation
President Obama seems to be unaware of any regulations that would concern farmers and equally ill-informed as to the source of those regulations.
TownHall.com | Two Different Worlds
Americans in general -- whether rich, poor or in between -- have one of the most remarkable records for donating not only money but time to all sorts of charitable endeavors.
AEI | Can the Middle Class Be Rebuilt?
It seems unlikely that the president has been saving the real solutions until now. There is not much he can do.
Blogs
Heritage Foundation | Exxon Storming the Arctic
Last week, oil giant ExxonMobil announced an agreement with Russia’s state oil company, Rosneft, to explore for oil in the Arctic continental shelf in the Kara Sea. America’s largest oil company is taking the place of BP (British Petroleum), whose dealings with Rosneft earlier this year collapsed.
Café Hayek | My druthers
Don’t increase federal spending, it’ll be wasted on cronies, make our deficit worse and have little lasting effect on reaching recovery. Instead, better to make the tax system more transparent and fix the demographic train wreck of Social Security and Medicare now rather than later.
Heritage Foundation | Case in Point: When the Law Is Used to Limit America’s Freedom of Action
The law, increasingly, is becoming a tool used by opponents of American power to harass American officials and, through the courts, limit America’s freedom of action.
Daily Capitalist | ‘Regime Uncertainty’ — Not Just A Theory
That is the nature of regulation. Government leaves it up to the agencies, the actual regulators, to flesh out the law through voluminous regulations. You can never be sure what they mean. Any lawyer can testify to this truth.
Atlantics: Megan McArdle | Whither the Post Office?
Congress has to decide whether universal mail service is valuable enough to subsidize, or whether it wants the post office to be set free to actually compete.
Café Hayek | The Curious Task
Your productivity is a function of your skills, your investments in knowledge, your work ethic, and the capital that you have to work with. Laws that mandate higher wages don’t affect any of these things. They just make low-skilled workers more expensive.
Reports
AEI | The Error at the Heart of the Dodd-Frank Act
The financial crisis was not caused by one firm's failure, but by a common shock to all firms: the decline in mortgage values after the housing bubble collapsed, exacerbated by mark-to-market accounting.
RCM: Wells Fargo | Welcome Respite: ISM Non-Manufacturing Picks Up in August
Sentiment among purchasing managers at the nation’s service companies picked up modestly in August, suggesting that, despite other bad news, the economic recovery is not completely stalling.
