News
National Journal | American Kids Are Really Bad at Handling Money
Score another one for Chinese teenagers, who leave U.S. kids in their dust when it comes to knowing how to handle money. That's the latest anxiety-producing statistic (for American parents, anyway) to emerge out of a newly released international study of the financial habits of roughly 29,000 teens from countries as far flung as Australia, China, Colombia, France, Israel, Russia, Spain, and the U.S.
FOX News | Why jobs are scarce, wages low and CD rates depressed
Americans keep hoping for a robust recovery -- one that delivers better paying jobs and decent returns on retirement savings. Changes in technology and the economy may require that never happens, and government efforts to improve conditions often multiply the misery.
Bloomberg | Growth Seen Beating 3% in Sixth Year of U.S. Expansion
The fifth anniversary of the U.S. economic expansion will usher in a rare boon: growth exceeding 3 percent over a nine-month period, a Bloomberg survey of economists shows.
Econ Comments & Analysis
Politico | America the Oil Exporter
The United States is once again the top oil producer in the world, surpassing Saudi Arabia and Russia. This year, America is on pace to pump out an average of 12 million barrels a day of crude oil plus gas liquids, an all-time record level. Add in biofuels and volumetric gains from refining, and the United States is effectively producing 14 million barrels a day. All this is the extraordinary result of the shale-oil revolution, in which new extraction technology—hydraulic fracturing, or fracking—has made vast reserves suddenly economically viable.
Forbes | Obama's Wrong; The Economy Is Improving Because Of Congressional Deadlock
President Obama says the recent jobs report shows the economy is recovering; but it would be doing even better, he asserts, if Republicans would end the deadlock and pass his tax-increasing, big-spending agenda. To the contrary, a stronger case can be made that the economy is improving precisely because Obama and Congress are deadlocked.
WSJ | Why Piketty's Wealth Data Are Worthless
No book on economics in recent times has received such a glowing initial reception as Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the Twenty-First Century." He remains a hero on the left, but the honeymoon may be drawing to a sour close as evidence mounts that his numbers don't add up.
Market Watch | Piketty’s cure for income inequality hurts the poor
Thomas Piketty’s best-selling “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” has given policy makers and pundits a renewed excuse to call for the redistribution of wealth and higher taxes.
The American | Capitalizing on the Capitalist Peace
The next time the United States is compelled to try to rescue and rehabilitate a broken nation, Washington needs to pay as much attention to building free markets as to holding free elections.
AEI | Liberals go to the barricades to defend crony capitalism
In the current battle over the Export-Import Bank, Democratic politicians and liberal journalists have dropped their populist pretenses and openly embraced the corporate-federal collusion that Ex-Im embodies.
CATO | Design Matters: The Future of School Choice
Though voucher programs tend to receive more attention, more than six in ten students attending private school through an educational choice program are using tax-credit scholarships. Nearly 200,000 students use tax-credit scholarships in 11 states, and three other states have recently enacted but not yet implemented scholarship tax credit (STC) laws. States looking to expand educational choice are more likely to adopt a scholarship tax credit because STC laws face fewer constitutional obstacles than government-funded vouchers and elicit higher levels of public support.
