August 12, 2010

Summer of No Recovery

Summer time, and the living is easy -- that is, if you are one of the 22.77 million people employed by the government, representing one out of seven people currently employed. If you are unemployed and hoping for an economic uptick to increase chance...

July 17, 2010

Is the French Revolution Relevant?

The French Revolution was born at the convergence of a debt crisis in France coupled with a monarchy that lost touch with its subjects. King Louis was born to privilege and had assumed the throne with no meaningful experience.The French King Louis XV...

June 17, 2010

The Truth about the Unemployment Rate in America

Changes in the unemployment rate are driven by interaction of job destruction, which consists of job losses through voluntary and involuntary job termination and job creation resulting in the hiring of employees. This interplay of job destruction and...

April 30, 2010

Financial Reform: Symptoms vs. Root Cause

The grilling of the executives at Goldman Sachs in Senate hearings was a display of Congress trying to deflect focus from their own bad behavior while pointing out bad behavior on Wall Street.  Two wrongs don't make it right, but if not for the ...

September 7, 2009

Bursting the Government Bubble

In the last decade, we have witnessed the bursting of two bubbles, the stock market bubble driven by internet stocks with unsustainable business models and valuations, and more recently, the private debt bubble that has resulted in the destruction of...

July 16, 2009

Stimulus 3.0?

We are now in midst of spending the money of the second stimulus spending package to revive the ailing economy. The first stimulus enacted in early 2008 under President Bush called for government checks to be issued in the amount of $152B. Now, Laura...

June 20, 2009

Stimulating America's Decline

Barack Obama signed the Stimulus bill on Feb. 18, 2009 amid much fanfare. Proponents of the bill stated that it would save or create 3.5 million jobs. Now, four months have passed since the passage of the stimulus package, its time to take a first lo...

June 2, 2009

The Second Coming of Jimmy Carter

Remember the good old days of the Jimmy Carter presidency when the US saw the combination of high inflation and high unemployment? We are sowing the seeds for a return to those days of national malaise.The US economy is suffering from the economic tr...

May 26, 2009

California, a Failed State

California is facing economic failure resulting from years of a liberal legislature pursuing a liberal version of utopia.  The liberal utopia has become the Forgotten Man's hell.  California has been at the forefront of many trends in Ameri...

May 12, 2009

The Politicization of the Auto Industry

The American automotive industry will not be nationalized under the Obama administration; it will be politicized. With Chrysler in bankruptcy, and General Motors soon to follow, we are provided with an opportunity to view the future of the automotive...

April 21, 2009

The Apology Obama Should Have Given

President Obama's famous Apology Tour missed some of the critical aspects of American attitude and behavior throughout history for which we should express regret.Here is the apology the President of the United States should have offered to the w...

April 10, 2009

Representation without Taxation

With the trillions in spending by the new Administration for the federal budget, and bailouts, our new President has two problems to solve:1. He needs to keep and expand his support base, some quarters of which are uneasy with the magnitude of the sp...

March 13, 2009

Moral Hazard Meets the Forgotten Man

What follows is a hypothetical account, but it illustrates a point of rational economic decision making in a world of economic distortion.A middle-class, taxpaying, work-a-day family man decides in 2001 to buy a house for his wife and new child in a ...