I spent five years working with poverty law advocates and analysts, and it is with those eyes that I’m viewing the proposed $700B bailout of Wall Street. There’s an obvious point to be made here that maybe finally the bootstrappin’ free-marketers finally might develop some empathy for the deadbeat moms and learn that everyone is [...]
We keep hearing from our leaders that “Institution X is too important to fail.” And I’m not in a great position to second-guess just how important companies like Freddie Mac, Frannie Mae, and AIG are, and whether their demise would lead to worldwide depression or not. But what I do now know is that when [...]
Marxism may be dead, but lefty activists still seem to itch for some good old-fashioned class warfare. With rising inequality in America (see this New York Times article from 2006), it’s easy to understand why. But Marxist cynicism is, I think, exactly the wrong way to look at inequality.
We often assume that people vote with [...]
To stave off recession, Congress and the President urge us to buy more stuff. Encouraging Americans to keep shopping, they tell us, will plump our economy — despite fundamental shifts in the world economy, not to mention two large-scale wars. Whatever the economic merits of this plan, I believe that promoting consumerism is bad for [...]
Prices of food have hit the roof, but nothing has gotten more expensive faster than organic foods. By the laws of economics, organic food consumption will surely fall:
“Man, $6.99 for a gallon of milk is pushing it. We have to be very careful about not pricing organics out of the market.”
– Perry Abbenante, global grocery [...]
I’ve been ranting about the hidden costs of home ownership for some time now (here’s one rant), and today’s NYT features another that is often cited by economists but dismissed by home ownership zealots: job mobility
“You hear a lot about foreclosure and the thousands of families who are being forced out,” said Joseph S. Tracy, [...]
What’s the advantage of acting privileged or entitled — basically, demanding things you don’t necessarily deserve based on the normal rules of the game? Perhaps it works like a loan — you get what you need now (presumably which is when you need it) rather than later, letting you profit off that thing, even if [...]
On Sunday, the Globe analyzed recent findings from economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez that the burden of American taxes are increasingly shifting away from the wealthy, at least in the top 2/3 of the income scale, and approaching flat taxation. While discussion of this phenomenon (which is not universally accepted as fact) often focuses [...]
A syndicated column in this past week’s Sunday Globe asserted that home ownership is always better than renting, even when home prices go down. I won’t go through the logic here, but it rests on the assumption that your goal is lifetime consumption maximization, not, say, saving money for your children to inherit.
Today the Economix [...]
Peabody is looking at reviving its downtown. The mayor’s committee “agreed on what, over the years, has become almost a chant in response to the question of what will bring people downtown — special attractions, theater, the arts, ethnic restaurants and festivals, a farmers market, stores that offer specialties, and services that one may not [...]
