President Obama has picked another “winner” among green technologies meant to portend an energy revolution. This time it is a Korean-owned battery factory in Michigan, part of a $2.4 billion government investment in electric car battery technology in spite of a global glut of battery supply. However, the question is not really whether the technology is a good or bad idea but rather why the federal government is making these investment choices in the first place. Perhaps it is because the government has a valuable role to play in spotting …
It often happens that flawed theories put into practice expose their internal inconsistencies for all to see before long. We now see this playing out in the case of Keynesian stimulus and the U.S. economy, and the stimulus defenders are at a loss. By any measure, the Keynesian debt-based stimulus pushed into the economy in recent years has been extraordinary. Typically prescribed in doses of from 1 to 2 percent of the economy, from 2008 to 2009 the federal budget deficit jumped by 6.7 percentage points, yet the unemployment rate …
Last week in a legislative briefing Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D–CA) stoked the unemployment insurance (UI) debate by stating that unemployment checks are the fastest way to create jobs. Let me say that unemployment insurance… is one of the biggest stimuluses (sic) to our economy. Economists will tell you, this money is spent quickly. It injects demand into the economy, and it’s job creating. It creates jobs faster than almost any other initiative you can name. Given that a similar debate over extending federal unemployment benefits may also …
Carnegie Mellon University economics professor and American Enterprise Institute visiting scholar Allan Meltzer has a must read op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal titled: Why Obamanomics Has Failed: Uncertainty about future taxes and regulations is enemy No. 1 of economic growth. It is re-posted in its entirety below but as an added bonus we have added links supporting many of his factual and theoretical claims: The administration’s stimulus program has failed. Growth is slow and unemployment remains high. The president, his friends and advisers talk endlessly about the circumstances they …
Although Canada’s taxpayers were forced to spend one billion dollars for security at the G-20 Summit in Toronto last weekend, more than 600 people were arrested after a roving bands of protesters shattered shop windows for blocks. At that point, as Mark Steyn points out, the “insecure dweebs of the Toronto police” started threatening law-abiding passers-by. Meanwhile, on substance the G-20 ended up being the flop many predicted. That didn’t stop President Obama, who talked on and on from the beginning of the confab through his wrap-up press conference trying …
In a rather confessional tone, Jeffrey Sachs declared in his recent op-ed: The global fiscal stimulus championed last year by the Obama administration is coming undone, repudiated by the same Group of 20 that endorsed it last year. Now, against a backdrop of a widening sovereign debt crisis, we need to abandon short-term thinking in favour of the long-term investments needed for sustained recovery. Indeed, the current period of uncertain and fragile economic rebound poses a critical opportunity to ponder the principles that can revitalize economic growth. More than ever, …
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has produced a new report estimating that the $862 billion stimulus has thus far saved or created 1.5 million jobs. Yet the CBO’s calculations are not based on actually observing the economy’s recent performance. Rather, they used an economic model that was programmed to assume that stimulus spending automatically creates jobs—thus guaranteeing their result. Logicians call this the begging-the-question fallacy. Mathematicians call it assuming what you are trying to prove.
With all the money that has been shelled out through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 Act, it turns out that the State department has its hand out, too. The State Department is requesting funding for a Foreign Affairs Security Training Center — to provide U.S. diplomats, or at least those charged with protecting them, with a greater set of survival skills. Just this New year’s Eve, the killings of seven CIA employees at the CIA’s base in Khost Province, Afghanistan, near Pakistan, was a deadly reminder of …
President Obama last week told a group of Republican members of Congress who were at the White House that, every economist he has talked to said they need to spend more money to create jobs and stimulate the economy. The President then asked them to produce a list of economists that say we shouldn’t spend money to get us out of the problem. Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) today released such a list. 222 economists from across the nation signed on to support a statement that cautions against out of control …
Federal stimulus spending is stimulating business for contractors helping the government figure out how to spend the stimulus money, reports the Washington Post. Government agencies say they can’t properly oversee the $789 billion stimulus package without hiring outside help. As a result, the region around the nation’s capital is doing just fine. Reports the Post: Of the stimulus grants and contracts awarded so far, the District has received nearly 10 times as much per capita as the national average, and Maryland has received more per capita than much harder-hit states, …
