Free Republic

With President Obama in office, the days of governments extracting a top marginal rate of 60% will return. Could bell bottoms be far behind? Remember how the press made George Bush’s tax rate cuts look so “huge” in 2001 and 2003? A March 10, 2001, New York Times article by reporters Frank Bruni and Richard W. Stevenson typified the approach. The trick was to talk about the (scary) $1.6 trillion impact of the “cuts” while minimizing attention to their time frame. At the linked article, the reporters waited until the ninth paragraph to tell us that it was a “$1.6...

STOCKHOLM -- In Sweden's general elections on Sunday it seems possible that voters will end 12 years of Social Democratic rule. As a matter of fact, the Social Democrats have been in power for 65 of the last 74 years, so a government change would really be historic. A group of four center-right parties known as the Alliance has been leading in opinion polls by three to five percentage points for weeks, but the race has tightened and appears too close to call now. "...The McKinsey Global Institute estimates Sweden's total unemployment rate to be 15%. That may surprise, as...

Daily Policy Digest The architects of the cradle-to-grave Swedish welfare system said that if it couldn't work there, it wouldn't work anywhere. Well, it didn't and it doesn't, says Investor's Business Daily (IBD). Funding the welfare state is a massive strain on a free economy. Entitlements and the administrative bureaucracy to manage it must be paid for. The only way to do that, aside from printing more currency, is to tax and tax again the wealth-, prosperity-creating private sector. That's a recipe for stagnation, not growth, says IBD: ** Sweden's slope became most slippery from 1960 to 1980, when public...

PARISLast Saturday morning, needing help to move several heavy cartons of books from my apartment in central Paris to a storage room, I hired two movers and a van from the want ads. Students were in the streets protesting the Contrat de Premier Embauche (CPE) -- a law proposed to combat unemployment by giving employers more flexibility to fire young employees -- and the barricades and traffic diversions made our four-block drive into a half-hour ordeal. As we turned down one obstructed street after another, the movers -- both Arab immigrants -- became more and more incensed."They're idiots," said the...

Leonid Kravchuk the First President of Ukraine reckons that the economic and political situation in Ukraine will worsen. "The prices on food, especially on meat, have been raised by more than100% in comparison with 2004. The prices on fuel are constantly getting higher. The inflation of the half-year is 15%, the gross domestic product reduced by 3.2 times. So, we have got all characteristic features of economic crisis. It goes without saying, that it negatively influences peoples’ life," stated Kravchuk. During his visits to Dnepropetrovsk, Lugansk, Vinnitsa and Odessa he spoke with people who stated that the new power had...

FRANKFURT, Germany (AP) -- Germany's economy grew 1 percent in the first quarter from the previous quarter, the strongest rate in four years, the government statistics office said Thursday. But it expects the pace to slow for the rest of the year. Europe's largest economy broke out of the 0.1 contraction that it posted in the last quarter of 2004, the Federal Statistics Office said, and grew at twice the 0.5 percent that economists had forecast. It was the strongest quarterly growth since the Germany's gross domestic product grew 1 percent in the first quarter of 2001. "This is a...

"Redistricting" isn't a word that easily flows off the tongue, nor is it normally part of the vocabulary of the average voter. But Californians are certain to hear and read it for at least the next few months as part of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's plan to reform the state government from the ground up. Redistricting is the process of changing the boundaries of the districts by which voters elect representatives to office. When it comes to the Assembly and Senate districts for the state Legislature, boundaries are drawn by the Legislature itself. In 2001, leaders of both the Democratic and...

Can Japan Ever Emerge from Stagnation? By Andrew L. Jaffee, November 13, 2003 Home   Search   Forum   Terms Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's party, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), lost seats in parliamentary elections held last weekend. Elected in 2001 on a pro-economic reform platform, Koizumi has been slow to deliver. Some fear the LDP's election losses will mean even slower reforms. Remember "Japan, Inc.", the envy of American corporate bosses? Remember when many Americans were afraid that prime property in U.S. downtowns and golf courses would all be bought by Japanese? That was then (1970 - 1990), when Japanese corporations seemed unstoppable...

People moved out of Central New York at the third-highest rate in the nation between 1995 and 2000, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. People leaving Onondaga, Madison, Oswego and Cayuga counties outnumbered those moving in by 31,851 during the five-year period. That represents 4.6 percent of the region's population over age 5. Only two other major metropolitan areas - Honolulu and El Paso, Texas - lost larger percentages of their populations to migration. Those are some of the findings contained in a bureau report analyzing the nation's migration patterns. The report, released today, is based on the 2000 Census,...

<p>Ninety-nine years ago this past Tuesday, Dec. 17, amid some windblown sand dunes on the shores of North Carolina, the first powered, controlled heavier-than-air flight occurred.</p> <p>It was accomplished, as the popular myth has it, by two "bicycle mechanics" from Dayton, Ohio. The reality, of course, was that they almost single-handedly invented modern aerodynamics and aeronautical engineering, and they did it on their own, with their own resources.</p>

As Japan's government announces another dollop of public spending, its debt is downgraded again by a leading rating agency. The news comes after gloomy economic forecasts and sharp falls in the share prices of Japan’s banks. Speculation is mounting that some of them will be nationalised TALK about piling on the gloom. On November 21st, one of the leading credit-rating agencies, Fitch, announced it was, yet again, downgrading Japan's sovereign-debt rating. This was the latest in a series of humiliating assessments for Japan. And it came on top of gloomy economic forecasts from the Bank of Japan, on November 20th,...

It is exactly 20 years since the former Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, died.Good riddance too - Ivan The latter part of his 18 years as general secretary of the Communist Party saw the Soviet economy slide. And when Mikhail Gorbachev took over the post in 1985, the Brezhnev years were called "the era of stagnation". Brezhnev would not recognise Moscow now. 'Figure of scorn' The grey society over which he presided has been replaced by colourful, often brash capitalism. Yet many Russians remain nostalgic for the law and order of Brezhnev's Soviet Union. What tends to be forgotten is how...

<p>NASA may, thankfully, be about to make major changes in its vaunted "Space Launch Initiative," known in acronym shorthand as SLI.</p> <p>A major review of the program scheduled for November has been rescheduled, with no definite new date. Its future is in flux, as policy in space transportation (particularly reusable space transportation) is clearly being rethought.</p>

Well, he said it. The Stability and Growth Pact, the keystone in the arch of the single currency, is "stupid". We have this on the authority of Romano Prodi, the president of the European Commission, no less, speaking to Le Monde last week. Despite the damage limitation exercise from his spokesman - Mr Prodi had really meant only that it should be used intelligently - the cat was out of the bag. The pact has provided neither stability nor growth, and it's clear that many countries in the eurozone intend to take not a blind bit of notice of it....

<p>There was a story last week about the unaccountable accounting on the Air Force's Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle program.</p> <p>This is a program in which the government gave Boeing and Lockheed Martin, the manufacturers of the Delta, and Atlas and Titan launch vehicles, respectively, millions of dollars in funding to help them both improve the performance and reliability of the systems, and to reduce their cost. The catch is that these are ostensibly commercial systems, so this is in effect a taxpayer subsidy of what should be in theory private enterprise.</p>