I'LL COME back soon with a review of the contents, but the cover art for this week's Economist ("America's future: California v Texas") is too good to hold for later.
Continue reading "JULY 11 / The Economist on Texas and California" »
IF YOU don't have an answer to the issues posed below, you have nothing useful to add to the central public policy debate of our time.
Continue reading "JULY 8 / This post is boring. Read it anyway." »
IT'S HARD to know whether President Obama's health-care "reform" is naive, hypocritical or simply dishonest. Probably all three.
Continue reading "JULY 8 / Samuelson on health care, welfare" »
[I]N THE LONG RUN today's fiscal laxity is unsustainable. Governments' thirst for funds will eventually crowd out private investment and reduce economic growth. More alarming, the scale of the coming indebtedness might ultimately induce governments to default or to cut the real cost of their debt through high inflation.
IAN BREMMER, "State Capitalism Comes of Age," Foreign Affairs, May/June 2009:
Until very recently, New York City was the world's financial capital. It no longer is even the financial capital of the United States. That distinction now falls to Washington, where members of Congress and the executive branch make decisions with long-term market impact on a scale not seen since the 1930s. A similar shift is taking blace throughout the world . . . .
PRESIDENT OBAMA has bet the economy on his program to grow the government and finance it with a more progressive tax system. It's hard to miss the irony that he's pitching this change in Washington even as the same governance model is imploding in three of the largest American states where it has been dominant for years -- California, New Jersey and New York.
THE INTERGENERATIONAL theft represented by the graph at the bottom of this (and other) posts will ruin the lives of our offspring, Unca D once wrote.
That most of our children and grandchildren ignoratantly voted for this outcome is no comfort. They didn't know any better, and that's our fault too.
One aging reader refuses to accept a share of the blame.
BEFORE the Houston Chronicle publishes yet another by-the-numbers editorial in favor of a new tax or a new spending program or a new regulatory scheme or a new constitutional change to make Texas more like, say, California, Ohio, or Michigan, intellectual honesty should compel the paper to explain how . . .
HOW FREE is Texas?
Fifth among the fifty states, according to a February report by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University: Freedom in the 50 States: An Index of Personal and Economic Freedom.
UNCA DARRELL's first post was May 24, 2008 -- an image of ephemeral folk art in Smut Eye, Alabama, soon followed by this image, this one, and yet another.
These were experiments, to see how this blogging thing worked. In the next year I would post more than 700 times, mostly about journalism and politics. Now it's time to evaluate the year and decide whether to continue.
Six points:
