Free Republic

Jared Bernstein is perhaps the most influential "economist" in the United States. I put economist in quotes, despite his being an academic who has taught the subject and has advised Congress and the highest elected officials in America. I do so because he is a moron. He is such a moron that Paul Krugman himself admires him for his economic insights. He is that bad. ... This is absolutely priceless. And probably the most frightening clip you'll ever watch on the people in charge of the US economy. Jared Bernstein is literally the Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers,...

The Biden administration laid out an ambitious new goal for the US: produce 20% of the world’s most advanced semiconductor chips by the end of the decade. It currently makes 0% of the so-called leading edge logic chips that are considerably more powerful than older-generation semiconductors, making them crucial for everything from mobile phones to AI to quantum computing. The legislation allows the White House to spend $50 billion in taxpayer dollars — $39 billion specifically earmarked for manufacturing — to try and help reignite American manufacturing in the years ahead.

As Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis gears up for an expected jump into the 2024 presidential race next week, his powerful adversary, Disney, trampled his pre-launch buzz by scratching a $1 billion plan for an office campus that could have brought 2,000 jobs to the state. The move was the latest twist in a bitter feud between DeSantis and one of the most important corporations operating in the Sunshine State, rooted in a political collision over the Republican governor’s hardline conservative ideology that will become his pitch to GOP primary voters. And it raises the question of whether Floridians are paying...

id America’s Founding Fathers really embrace a nationalist economic program of tariffs and industrial subsidies? According to the “National Conservative” movement, such Founding Era luminaries as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison eventually abandoned their free-trade instincts and embraced a program of economic policies not unlike the NatCon agenda today. The American Compass website celebrates “Thomas Jefferson’s conversion to Hamiltonian supporter of domestic industry,” echoing Patrick Buchanan’s 2018 claim that “Tariffs Made America Great.” Most arguments in this genre point to Jefferson’s qualified commentaries on the Tariff of 1816 as evidence of this claim, while also noting the law was signed...

resident Joe Biden's performance at the meeting with foreign leaders in Britain last week was a disgrace. Biden cut deals with Britain that sold out America's interests, and for doing so, he won the worshipful accolades of the Europeans, the Brits and the Canadians. It's amazing how popular you are at a party when you pay everyone's bills. Except Biden isn't spending his own money, of course. He's spending ours. It would be an understatement to say that the Euroland leaders weren't big fans of former President Donald Trump. Trump went to the G-7 meetings and told his international peers...

Subsidize something — get more of it. Expect the Biden economy to have additional unemployment, increased poverty, and lower incomes for a longer period.resident Biden’s plan for federal coronavirus relief resembles the American Recovery Reinvestment Act (ARRA) signed by President Obama after the 2008 financial crisis. It uses several federal agencies to separately distribute financial assistance to persons unemployed, in poverty, or otherwise with low incomes, on top of the dozens of programs already in place. Predictably, it will result in a disappointing economic recovery as long as it lasts. The plan includes a $100 weekly unemployment bonus, on top...

Which presidential candidate will bankrupt America first, Donald Trump or Joe Biden? Last year, we compared the costs of the leading Democratic candidates' promises. At that time, Biden, to his credit, proposed the least new spending. Kamala Harris promised the most. She wanted to add $4.2 trillion to America's debt. Her lavish promises didn't win her supporters; she dropped out soon after. But now she's Biden's running mate, and Biden promises to spend more. That's unusual. Historically, Democrats moved left during the primaries, and then back toward the center once nominated. Not this time. Biden's people met with Bernie Sanders'...

The stock market is rebounding on the news that the Federal Reserve is considering an interest rate decrease, but some commentators are spinning this as a sign of economic calamity.“We are closely monitoring the implications of these developments for the U.S. economic outlook and, as always, we will act as appropriate to sustain the expansion, with a strong labor market and inflation near our symmetric 2 percent objective,” Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said Tuesday.Experts widely interpreted this as an indication that the Fed may soon implement a rate cut after raising rates steadily over the entire course of Donald...

For more than a generation, James Carville's campaign maxim, "It's the economy, stupid," has been held up as an essential truth of American politics. There's no denying that a strong economy is an incumbent president's best friend. Seventy-three percent of voters currently rate the economy as a very important issue. As a result, if the economy remains strong for another 1 1/2 years, many analysts believe President Donald Trump will be favored to win reelection. On the other hand, if a recession hits next year, we will almost certainly have a new president in 2021. However, recent data about the...

In September of 2015 we shared one of the overarching reasons why CTH would support Donald Trump for President. – SEE HERE – This week, the sentiment behind that reasoning showed up in Davos, Switzerland for the World Economic Forum; we could not be more proud. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross (Wednesday), Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin (Thursday) and U.S. President Donald Trump (Friday), collectively outlined how our new U.S. trade and economic policy would engage with the world. Many media voices (narrative engineers) will, and have, continue to obfuscate, spin, and make predictive declarations about U.S. economic policies based on their...

Greg Caskey is a 27-year-old Abington, Pennsylvania, native who is a social sciences teacher at Delaware Military Academy. The academy is a thriving charter high school in Wilmington, Delaware, that was founded in 2003 by two retired military officers, Charles Baldwin and Jack Wintermantel. Students from all socio-economic backgrounds attend the school, which is doing a stellar job of teaching reading, writing and arithmetic and, just as importantly, moral character and self-discipline. Mr. Caskey is one of the school's standout teachers. He has developed an innovative way of teaching the principles of economics to the school's students -- a curriculum...

Venezuela descends into chaos. Its people, once the wealthiest in Latin America, starve. Even The New York Times runs headlines like "Dying Infants and No Medicine." My Venezuelan-born friend Kenny says his relatives are speaking differently. Cousins who once answered "Fine" or "Good" when asked, "How are you?" now say, "We're eating." Eating is a big deal in the country that's given birth to jokes about a "Venezuelan diet." A survey by three universities found 75 percent of Venezuelans lost an average 19 pounds this year. So are American celebrities who championed Venezuela's "people's revolution" embarrassed? Will they admit they...

Like it or not, Hillary Clinton is the single individual most likely to be elected the next president. So it's worthwhile looking closely at and behind her words when she deigns to speak on public policy, as she did in her July 14 speech on economics. It contained quite a bit of chaff as well as some wheat. There were laments about the nation's current economic woes, without mention that they come in the seventh year of a Democratic administration; a few policies first advocated by Republicans (Jack Kemp's enterprise zones); and proposals that she admits are "time-tested and more...

When I listen to Hillary Clinton speak, as she did Monday at The New School in New York, outlining her "economic policy" should she become president, my first reaction was not to her lack of substance and the predictability of her party line about taxing the rich more and "income inequality," but to how boring she is. I love definitions. They help focus the mind. But not everyone defines a word the same way. Dictionary.com defines "bore" in several ways, all of which fit Hillary Clinton. As a verb used with an object, it says, "to weary by dullness, tedious...

...WALLACE:The White House has made it clear that it flatly opposes paying ransom..now,ISIS is making a new demand,offering a swap of the Japanese hostage for a terrorist being held in Jordan.Is that something to be considered?MCDONOUGH:You know,our policies are pretty well set..We don't get into negotiation with terrorists.We don't pay ransom..we're not going to do that.WALLACE:And a prisoner swap?MCDONOUGH:We're not going to do that.WALLACE:And you would advise the Japanese not to do that......WALLACE:..the president wants to pay for free community college,for increased child care tax credits by raising taxes on the wealthy,$210 billion over 10 years......WALLACE:..during the Obama years,the top...

France’s President and Prime Minister have said Brussels has no right to tell them which economic reforms to make. Speaking to AFP on a visit to Rodez, in southern France, on Wednesday (29 May), President François Hollande said: “The European Commission cannot dictate to us what we have to do. It can simply say that France has to balance its public accounts, which is true.” … His Prime Minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, was equally defiant at a meeting in Matignon, in northeast France, with former German leader Helmut Schmidt the same day. He said: “We will carry out reforms in our...

In his State of the Union address, President Barack Obama proposed raising the minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $9 an hour. That would be almost a 25 percent increase. Let's look at the president's proposal, but before doing so, let's ask some other economic questions. Are people responsive to changes in price? For example, if the price of cars rose by 25 percent, would people purchase as many cars? Supposing housing prices rose by 25 percent, what would happen to sales? Those are big-ticket items, but what about smaller-priced items? If a supermarket raised its prices by...

I recently read the new biography of Trotsky by Oxford don Robert Service, published in 2009 by Pan Books. It is well-written and surprisingly interesting. The book does a great public service in describing the life of the actual Trotsky, whose previous “biographies” were little more than hagiographies written by his toady worshippers (people like Isaac Deutscher). The last time that I had taken any interest in Trotsky was when I was a teenager and had fleeting delusions of believing in “socialism.” Reading the new book as an adult and as an economist, I found it a useful opportunity to...

America continues to lose ground in economic libertyThe United States is no longer a beacon of freedom to the world. Countries once looked to America for inspiration on how to escape poverty and embrace prosperity, but now they can find better examples to follow. The Heritage Foundation on Thursday noted our fifth consecutive decline in its annual Index of Economic Freedom. It’s a sad day when countries such as Chile and Mauritius can outdo the red-white-and-blue when it comes to opportunity. U.S. economic policy has broken faith with the Founding Fathers, who preached the value of property rights, sound money...

WASHINGTON - The bleak truth about the comatose Obama economy is not just that it's barely breathing, but that it's still not far from another recession. President Obama's campaign bid for another four years is loosely based on the preposterous claim the economy is "moving forward." In fact, it's been falling backward or at least treading water on a number of fronts, and economic forecasters say it will weaken further under his policies, if he is re-elected. Economists predict yet another weak jobs figure Friday that may push the unemployment rate up a bit, reminding undecided voters and even jittery...