Free Republic

So what example should America follow, that of deficit-slaughtering, budget-cutting, seriously limited government in Texas, which has added 730,000 jobs in the past decade, or that of regulation-happy, spend-mercilessly, owe-everything, flee-this-place-quickly California, which has lost 600,000 jobs during the same period? While not a hard question [...] let's continue to look at some astounding facts about Texas after noting a much-repeated analysis of how it got there. It has no state income tax, low corporate taxes, does just enough regulating to get the job done, cares for the environment without making a fetish of it, lets its legislature meet for...

Part of a series on “green jobs” in Europe, this article focuses on Italy. Italy has been another early European leader in wind and solar power deployment. But a study performed by Luciano Lavecchia and Carlo Stagnaro of Italy’s Bruno Leoni Institute found serious problems with the Italian experience; in particular, that capital spent on green energy was vastly less efficient at creating jobs.Finally, we have compared the average stock of capital per worker in the RES [Renewable Energy Sector] with the average stock of capital per worker in the industry and the entire economy, finding an average ratio...

Pursuing a new green energy economy in the United Kingdom has led to lost jobs and higher energy prices. President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, and other political luminaries such as Arnold Schwarzenegger promise us a bright green future, but let’s look at how things have worked out in Europe, where green energy has been tested extensively. Does green energy lead to green jobs? This article is the second in a series that will look Europe’s experience. This time, we focus on the United Kingdom.Our Commonwealth cousins across the pond have also embraced the “green power...

California ranks near the bottom on some studies that claim to measure the business climate, yet the state’s economic growth is about the same as the nation’s from 1978 to 2008. Why? some researchers at the Public Policy Institute of California in San Francisco wondered. PPIC found, in a study of 11 major state rankings, that the ones that measure productivity and quality of life have little relationship to a state’s economic growth. The rankings that measure taxes and the cost of doing business do correlate somewhat to a state’s job and wage growth. But get this: “The factors that...

“The Congressional Budget Office’s report exposes the widening gulf between the President’s rhetoric and his budget’s reality,” said Ryan. “Simply put, the President’s budget spends too much, taxes too much, and borrows too much-and it continues to heap an unsustainable burden of debt on American families, today and in the future.”

Renewing the threat: those in Congress smart enough to reject cap-and-trade should be smart enough to reject it again, even if it is couched in different language. Now that cap-and-trade (emission trading to reduce greenhouse gas emissions) is more or less off the table, our politicians are starting to talk about something else—or, at least, something that looks like something else.There are various names for this alternative scheme, from renewable energy portfolio standards to clean energy standards to green energy standards. All of them basically involve the same thing: the government mandates that a certain percentage of electricity that utilities...

In September 1933, the Agriculture Adjustment Administration in an effort to raise the prices of commodities slaughtered six million young pigs. With unemployment hovering at 22.9%, the homeless numbers rising each day, in the middle of the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt's economic policy to drive up prices in order to help the farmer resulted in the slaughtering of six million pigs. Never mind that millions of Americans went to bed hungry each night, six million pigs were sacrificed to the economic experiment of FDR and his advisers. Not only did the poor and hungry not get to eat those pigs,...

"Money, pardon the expression, is like manure. It's not worth a thing unless it's spread around, encouraging young things to grow." Dolly Levi in Hello Dolly! It's true. Growth is good. Growth is what has distinguished America over the centuries. It is also true redistribution is bad. Redistribution is what defined the failed Soviet Union. Dividing up an increasingly smaller pie doesn't take you very far. Dolly Levi knew it. John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan knew it. So did ole Silent Cal Coolidge. Now would someone please tell Mr. Obama and Ms. Pelosi? Mr. Obama's redistributionist tendencies were well...

Increasing productivity in healthcare is difficult but not impossible. Here's how. The president tells us that we should be “bending the cost curve” on healthcare, and politicans everywhere are scrambling to present their favored pork projects as plans that would do just that. Lobbyists of every stripe and color are storming legislative offices with great wads of dead presidents and the commentariat debates angels dancing upon pinheads: that is, what could be done if we had a legislative system without legislators, pork, lobbyists, or dead presidents printed on pieces of paper.What I have yet to see (and apologies to those...

Japan’s historic election Sunday gave the Democratic Party an overwhelming victory over the Liberal Democrats that have dominated Japan’s government for 55 years.  The Liberal Democrats oversaw Japan’s industrial policy that supported Japan’s dominant firms during Japan’s rise as a major economic power during the 1960s, 70s, and 80s.  Indeed, many American economists argued the U.S. should do more to emulate Japanese industrial policy and have the government actively involved in supporting dominant corporations to enhance their international competitiveness.American support for industrial policy, where the government actively picks the winners in economic competition, died off in the 1990s when the...

Remember how the left kept screeching that Bush had alienated our allies and enraged our enemies? Remember how they said that Barack Obama would make the world love us again? Well, the Democrats get to wear their soiled underwear over their own heads, now. Because now we get to see on a nearly daily basis just how truly full of pure partisan garbage they have been for years. N. Korea Says It Conducted 2nd Nuclear TestSEOUL, South Korea — North Korea announced Monday that it successfully carried out a second underground nuclear test, less than two months after launching a...

I happen to go to recovery.gov today and saw a chart of the jobs planned to be created or "saved" - they plan to create or "save" 106,000 jobs in Georgia. Not 105,000 and not 107,000 - precisely 106,000. How could their planning possibly be so precise? After staring at the data for a few minutes, I realized the terrible truth. California - 396,000 Texas - 269,000 New York - 215,000 Florida - 206,000 Illinois - 148,000 Pennsylvania - 143,000 Ohio - 133,000 Michigan - 109,000 Georgia - 106,000 North Carolina - 105,000 Do you see the pattern? Pull 3,500,000...

Czech PM does not regret ‘road to hell’ row By Tony Barber in Prague Published: May 7 2009 08:55 | Last updated: May 7 2009 08:55 Mirek Topolanek, the outgoing Czech prime minister, says he has no regrets about condemning US economic policies as a potential “road to hell” in spite of the deep embarrassment his remarks caused the European Union. In an interview with the Financial Times, he also said that, if he could have done one thing differently during the four months he steered the EU’s affairs, it would have been to rein in the free-ranging Middle East...

The US and Europe were widely expected to clash at the G-20 summit in London last month over how to address the global financial crisis. Voila, in just two days the problem was solved with a joint promise to increase IMF resources by $750 billion to a total of $1 trillion. The US portion of this new commitment is more than $140 billion. Yet Congress has debated neither the amount nor the proposed use of the funds. Instead, Obama and his fellow leaders simply waved their hands like a Star Trek captain and said make it so.

***The following are excerpts. It is far better to read the entire commentary (long but good). The graph is scary - it will make sense if you read the whole commentary .*** Last week, the U.S. Treasury Secretary advanced two proposals; one was a call for regulatory reform that is absolutely essential to the resolution of the current financial crisis. The other was a recipe for the insolvency of the FDIC, which would squander public funds to subsidize private speculation in troubled mortgage securities. [snip] Indeed, the only way for the toxic asset sale to increase shareholder equity is if...

Democratic leaders and the White House reached a deal to provide billions of dollars in relief to the ailing U.S. auto industry... The package, which Democratic leaders hope to win passage of next week and send to President George W. Bush, totals between $15 billion and $17 billion

Washington, D.C. (AHN) - Vice President-elect Joe Biden on Friday announced the creation of a new post under his office, and the appointment of pro-labor economist Jared Bernstein, to help the incoming administration fix the economy.Bernstein will serve as chief economist and economic policy adviser to the Vice President. His appointment comes the same day the Labor Department said the economy lost the most jobs in 34 year, and the same week as the the National Bureau of Economic Research officially announced that the U.S. economy has been in recession since December 2007. "Jared Bernstein is an acclaimed economist, and...

FDR's Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great DepressionBy Jim Powell What the Critics Say: " Very readable, factual, and insightful - and endorsed by two Nobel Prize-winning economists." (Thomas Sowell, Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University)Think FDR was a great president? Think again. In the minds of historians and the American public alike, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was one of our greatest presidents, not least because he supposedly saved America from the Great Depression. But as historian Jim Powell reveals in this groundbreaking book, Roosevelt's New Deal policies actually prolonged and exacerbated the economic disaster, swelled the...

President-elect Barack Obama may consider delaying a campaign promise - to roll back tax cuts on high-income Americans - as part of his economic recovery strategy, two aides said on Sunday. David Axelrod, the Obama campaign strategist who was chosen to be a senior White House adviser, was asked if the tax cuts could be allowed to expire on schedule after tax year 2010 rather than being rolled back by legislation earlier. "Those considerations will be made," he said on "Fox News Sunday." Bill Daley, an adviser to Obama and commerce secretary under former President Bill Clinton, said on NBC's...

The U.S. financial system still needs at least $1 trillion to $1.2 trillion of tangible common equity to restore confidence and improve liquidity in the credit markets, Friedman Billings Ramsey analyst Paul Miller said. The bulk of the capital will have to come from the U.S. government, Miller said. The government needs to take the initial steps to begin the process, and private capital and earnings can finish the job. "The quicker the government acts, the sooner the financial system can work through its current problems and begin to supply credit again to the economy," he said.