President Obama’s political operatives—if Vice President Joe Biden merits even that honorific—are going to the wall this campaign season on the government bailout of the automakers from a few years back. “Bin...
Spain is now in recession. Greece is bracing for elections, as is France, which could unleash class warfare. Austerity, low growth rates, and debt stalk the continent. The place caught such a cold that even the United...
“Thinly-veiled Social Darwinism” has emerged as the attack line of choice of President Obama on the theme of the budget proposal of Republican Rep. Paul Ryan. Ryan’s budget seeks to slow the growth of federal spending...
Gasoline prices double, triple what we had gotten used to in years past. Warnings from the oil producers that worldwide demand was stretching them thin. Talk of taxing oil companies. Environmental tensions over pipelines...
Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke’s big speech last week before the students at George Washington University didn’t necessarily start out to be a screed against the gold standard, but it sure turned out that...
President Obama’s main economic advisor from early on in his term, Christina Romer, is trying to discredit supply-side economics. On Sunday, she took to her column in the New York Times to dismiss the “worn out...
Every crisis has in its official response an implicit official explanation of why the crisis began. As he took office at the trough of the Great Depression in 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt banned the private possession...
Last week Paul Krugman made sport of a Mitt Romney malapropism on the campaign trail. Apparently Romney, on the stump in Michigan, had said, “If you just cut, if all you’re thinking about doing is cutting spending,...
President Obama’s budget released last week naturally has lots of people agog. Its plan, outrageous on its face, is to take spending past $4 trillion and as much as double the income tax on high-earners, while supervising...
As of January 2009, the nation had been in recession for thirteen months. The economy was in its fourth down quarter over the last five. Stocks were lower by 40%. And unemployment was up three full points, to 7.5%. By any...