According to the Cato Institute, federal subsidy programs topped the 2,000 mark for the first time last week. Almost half of those have been created in the last 20 years: the number of federal subsidy programs soared 21 percent during the 1990s and 40 percent during the 2000s. As Chris Edwards, Cato’s director of tax…
Posts
Electricity Consumers Benefit from Competition
I just released some research, “Prices, Reliability, and Consumer Choice in the Texas Electricity Market,” examining how consumers have fared when it comes to the restructuring of the Texas electricity market to introduce competition. The results? Good. Click on the link to read the whole report.
National Geographic and the 1980s
When I was born, my grandparents gave me the wonderful gift of a lifetime subscription to National Geographic magazine. In addition to supplying a curious young boy with many years of amazement over the wonders of creation, at 50 years and counting it must have been a great value—especially when one factors in the rampant…
Five Cities That Ruled the World
I just finished reading about the second city, Athens, in Doug Wilson’s Five Cities That Ruled the World. I love the concept. And love Doug Wilson. But while the book so far has presented a pretty good history of each city (Jerusalem and Athens), I didn’t learn why each city ruled the world. This aspect of each…
The Real Things Haven’t Changed
I ran across a great quote this morning to help us remember some of the things that really matter for which we can be grateful at this time of Thanksgiving: “The Little House Books are stories of long ago. Today our way of living and our schools are much different; so many things have made…
Computer Prices and Creative Destruction
I ran across a 1989 product comparison of several top-of-the-line computers. Including one from Dell, which featured an 80286 (20 MHz) processor and a 40 MB hard drive, all for the bargain price of $4,099! I remember consistently paying $3,000 for a new computer from Tandy (my first one, with an 8086 processor purchased in 1986)…
The $2.6 Trillion Health Care Plan
Don’t buy the claims that the ObamaCare bill will be deficit neutral. Don’t even trust the claim that it will result in increased spending of only $343 billion. And you can completely ignore the fiction that this bill will only cost $848 billion over the next ten years. The truth is that new spending in the…
When the Going Gets Tough, Let the Government Handle it
Jobs, Jobs, Jobs
There are a lot of ways to measure how the economy is doing. But employment, or jobs, is probably the measure that means the most to us. On a macro level, we understand that it means something good when we read that two million new jobs were created and unemployment fell to 4.2%. On the…
A Blast from the Past
Watch this 1981 news report on something very new and exciting: reading the newspaper on your computer at home: