The rise in gas prices is reducing the American consumer’s disposable income, forcing a choice between filling up the tank and going out to dinner or taking a trip to the movie theater. But policy implementations in developed countries are doing much more damage internationally, like pushing 30 million people into poverty. That’s the latest number, according to Oxfam International, a confederation of 13 organizations that seek to alleviate poverty worldwide. It boils down to a combination of special interest politics and simple economics, says Oxfam’s biofuel policy adviser Rob …
Since the United States abandoned the protectionist policies that helped cause the Great Depression it has been the world leader in bringing free trade to the rest of the world. Since the end of World War II, free trade has lifted billions out of poverty and decreased hunger worldwide But now that leadership is threatened and so is global peace and prosperity along with it. Bloomberg reports: After six decades of ever-expanding international commerce, the high tide of free trade is ebbing. … Most important is the U.S., the world’s …
Defending free trade from politicians who “pander to Americans’ suspicion of foreigners,” George Mason University economics professor Tyler Cowen writes in the New York Times: The last 20 years have brought the world more trade, more globalization and more economic growth than in any previous such period in history. Few commentators had believed that such a rise in trade and living standards was possible so quickly. More than 400 million Chinese climbed out of poverty between 1990 and 2004, according to the World Bank. India has become a rapidly growing …
Family fragmentation (e.g., divorce and unwed childbearing) in America costs U.S. taxpayers $112 billion a year and over $1 trillion per decade, according to a new study released on Tuesday. “We are confident this is a minimum figure because of the uniformly cautious assumptions built into our methodology,” the lead author of the study notes. For example, the $112 billion per year cost figure does not include a number of large government programs, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), Medicaid for the elderly and Medicare for unmarried adults, …
In the Wall Street Journal today American University and the University of Nevada at Reno economics professor Brad Schiller offers a great corrective to those who claim inequality is growing in the United States. First Schiller notes that while the share of the pie the bottom 20% of the population is earning is smaller than it was in 1970, the pie itself is much larger. Factoring in economic and population growth, Schiller explains, “the average income of people at the bottom of the income distribution has risen 36%” since 1970. …
