Why I love Walmart despite never shopping there
Visit This Link →
But my esthetic and aspirational standards are those of a comparatively wealthy person even in U.S. terms, let alone world terms. To the people who use Walmart and belong there, Walmart is a tremendous boon that stretches their purchasing power, enabling them to have things that don’t suck.
Unemployment Insurance Changes Incentives to Work
Visit This Link →
Scott Sumner talks about unemployment insurance (UI).
The statistical evidence on UI is overwhelming significant. When the UI benefits maxed out at 26 weeks, there was a spike in the number re-employed right after the benefits ran out. That’s not to say the benefits are necessarily inefficient, if the spike was due …
Lets get real about poverty in America
Visit This Link →
Walter E. Williams, Professor of Economics at George Mason University, summarizes 3 recent papers about poverty in America: “Understanding Poverty in the United States: Surprising Facts About America’s Poor”, “The Material Well-Being of the Poor and the Middle Class Since 1980″, and “Income Mobility in the U.S. from 1996 to 2005″.
The truth is that there …
Debit-Card Law Has Nasty Side Effect
Visit This Link →
People are not just pieces to be moved around a chess board by wise overseers. They make their own decisions and you can’t predict what the ultimate effect of regulations will be.
Milton Friedman on Wealth Redistribution
I’m a sucker for Milton Friedman videos and I’m a sucker for people explaining the secondary effects of economic regulations: the unseen that comes after the seen. Friedman does that here, schooling a student on how a 100% inheritance tax on wealth would destroy our society.
Public Pensions: Some Numbers and Reality
Visit This Link →
I can get into the details of the situation where $29 billion in deposits and $62 billion in payouts aren’t a problem… but that’s not the situation that holds in NJ. It requires the benefits to be “running off”, where the population and benefit amounts are decreasing, and a nice, hefty investment fund to begin …
The S&P Downgrade
Visit This Link →
An oldie from August, that I’ve been hanging on to, for some reason. Veronique de Rugy breaks down S&P’s memo about why they downgraded US debt to an AA+ rating.
The bottom line:
In other words, to avoid a downgrade, it would have been key in S&P’s opinion to show signs of willingness to cut (contain) Medicare …
American Airlines Enters Bankruptcy
Visit This Link →
Megan McArdle, on my American Airlines is entering bankruptcy.
But airlines do have another problem that’s special to them: their unions, which are both powerful, and plentiful.
Whatever you think about the United Autoworkers, at least there’s only one of them. The union doesn’t want to kill the company any …
The Income Mobility of Millionaires
Visit This Link →
Hate the rich? Don’t worry, most of them won’t be rich for long. Only about 6% of millionaires manage to stay millionaires for 9 years or more.
Do We Really Spend More and Get Less?
Visit This Link →
If we ignore the fake prices that typify the American health care experience, it’s clear that the U.S. uses fewer resources to deliver health care than any other developed nation.
The concept of opportunity cost allows us to see that if we don’t trust spending totals in the international accounts, there is another way …