News
Investors | High Apartment Rents Seen Pushing People To Buy Homes
"There's no doubt rising rents will cause some potential homebuyers to think twice before renting. But we still look for only modest growth in home sales," said Paul Bishop, vice president of research at the National Association of Realtors.
Market Watch | Economy expands 2.8% in fourth quarter
The U.S. economy grew at the fastest rate in a year and a half in the fourth quarter, but a large chunk of the increase was fueled by an unexpected buildup in inventories, according to a preliminary government estimate.
WSJ | Recovery Doesn't Feature Typical Snapback in Growth
The U.S. economy has taken more than two years to claw its way back to producing the amount of goods and services it did just before the last recession.
Washington Times | Government-backed energy company files for bankruptcy
A company whose subsidiary won a $118 million grant from the Energy Department filed for bankruptcy Thursday, the third government-backed energy company to go broke in recent months.
WSJ | Obama Unveils Energy Plans
"We've got a supply of natural gas under our feet that can last America nearly a hundred years….It turns out we are the Saudi Arabia of natural gas," Mr. Obama said at a United Parcel Service Inc. facility that will serve as a refueling station for trucks that run on liquefied natural gas.
CNN Money | New-home sales hit a record low
Just 302,000 new homes were sold in 2011, 6.2% below 2010 and the lowest number of annual sales since the government started tracking home sales in 1963.
National Journal | Obama Announces Proposal to Push Colleges to Lower Tuition
"If you can't stop tuition from going up, then the funding you get from taxpayers each year will go down," Obama said, speaking of universities at-large, to students gathered at University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
Econ Comments & Analysis
CATO | Reshaping Social Security And Our Society
It all started March 18, 2010, with the enactment of the Hiring Incentives to Restore Employment (HIRE) Act. Under this law, employers who hired new workers from Feb. 4 to Dec. 31, 2010, qualified for up to a 6.2 percent payroll-tax deduction for each new worker, essentially exempting the employer from the Social Security tax. The tax deduction had no effect on the new employee’s Social Security retirement benefits, effectively delinking the two
AEI | The right idea in the wrong place
If America wants true high-speed rail, we should first improve the Northeast Corridor between Washington and Boston. The proposed high-speed rail line between Los Angeles and San Francisco is unlikely to meet that test.
Washington Post | Angry about inequality? Don’t blame the rich.
The “rich” in America are not a monolithic, unchanging class. A study by Thomas A. Garrett, economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, found that less than half of people in the top 1 percent in 1996 were still there in 2005.
Washington Times | Obama’s crony capitalism
Never in modern history has the U.S. government been used so extensively as a vehicle for benefiting political cronies at the expense of the rest of us.
WSJ | Your Tax Dollars Not at Work
Last week, President Barack Obama refused to allow private citizens to spend $7 billion improving America's energy infrastructure. Three years ago, he insisted that taxpayers spend more than 100 times that amount on an outlay that also addressed the nation's energy needs, among other goals.
Forbes | 'Systemic Risk' Is Not Event Driven, It Is Character Driven
Why does everybody start talking about systemic risk, after a crisis has already started? If we define a systemic risk event as something large enough to affect the entire global financial and economic system, then you would think that the best time for investors to be told about these terrible events is before they occur.
Blogs
Think Markets | President Obama’s State of Regulation
Barack Obama sounded a number of themes in his 2012 State of the Union Address this week, all underpinned by the proposition that socioeconomic ills can be solved by interventionist government in general and his administration in particular.
Heritage Foundation | World War II: Economic Stimulant or Depressant?
Did World War II spending boost economic growth? Although some statistics appear to affirm this, wiser historical analysis demonstrates that artificial increases in output during the war masked a debilitated private economy. Meaningful growth increased after the war, when free-market mechanisms returned and marginal tax rates were reduced.
