Free Republic

For the roughly 15 million college undergraduates in the United States, the benefits of pursuing higher education include better employment prospects, greater social mobility, and even longer-lasting marriages. Research released last year, however, finds that at least one important life outcome — political ideology — is heavily dependent not merely on the decision to attend college, but also on the particular subjects students choose to study. The paper, authored by Israeli academics Yoav Goldstein and Matan Kolerman, used survey responses from nearly 500 American colleges and universities to isolate the political impact of students’ choice of college majors. Those who...

And now you understand Bessent’s obsession. The entire funding base of the US government is, at the margin, LEVERED. The buyers are not holding the bonds with their own money.. they are holding them with borrowed money, rolled overnight, against collateral that gets marked to market daily. That is a magnificent machine when repo is cheap and calm, and a doomsday device if repo ever seizes: a repo spike forces margin calls, margin calls force bond sales, bond sales push yields up, higher yields trigger MORE margin calls.. and suddenly the buyer of last resort is selling into a falling...

As a governor and senator, Huey Long is best remembered for his radical proposals to redistribute wealth by force and for criticizing President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's "New Deal" as not expansive or progressive enough. So when Vice President J.D. Vance says out loud that he finds Long "great" and "interesting," that's worth keeping in mind.

The H-1B visa program is draining the incentive for complacent politicians to fix the broken K-12 system used by many millions of ordinary Americans, says Daron Acemoglu, a famous economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The educated elite “has given up on the education of Americans because they think that they can fill any skill gap with importing those skills [via the H-1B program], whether they are nurses, whether they’re doctors, whether they’re programmers. That’s the problem,” Acemoglu told Tyler Cowen, a zealously pro-migration economist at George Mason University. Acemoglu is an ethnic Armenian who used the H-1B program...

State-owned VEB.RF (Vnesheconombank) has stated that Russia cannot win the economic confrontation with the West as long as Western countries continue to support Ukraine. According to him, the Russian economy is facing rising costs, falling investment, and technological lag, reports The Moscow Times. The bank's chief economist, Andrei Klepach, said during a session of the Nikitsky Club that sanctions and the Western blockade are increasing the costs of the Russian economy, and that Ukrainian strikes on ports, infrastructure, chemical plants, and oil refineries are causing ever-greater damage to Russia. Klepach stated that Russia is losing the technological and economic competition...

Over the past eighteen months, nearly every condition analysts have long said would erode the dollar's dominance arrived at once. War broke out in the Persian Gulf. The Strait of Hormuz has closed, reopened, and closed again, and remains shut as this is written. Iran began charging transit tolls denominated in yuan. Indian refiners started settling Russian crude in yuan and dirhams, the first time a top-five oil importer structurally routed around the dollar for energy. China's cross-border payment system posted record volumes, clearing 1.22 trillion yuan in a single day in March. Central banks bought gold at a pace...

President Donald Trump on Wednesday blasted New York's new pause on AI data center development, arguing the state is turning away one of the biggest economic opportunities of the AI boom. "One of the biggest Driving Forces in the Future for Jobs, are Data Centers," Trump wrote on Truth Social, calling the facilities "Money Machines" and "Cash Cows" that generate jobs and tax revenue. He urged New York to reverse course "IMMEDIATELY," arguing companies would instead build projects in states such as Texas, Arizona, Alabama, and Florida.

JD Vance has served admirably as Donald Trump's vice president and has been a true asset to the administration. Right now, he's favored to be the next Republican nominee for president when 2028 rolls around. But there are many other viable contenders. That's why his latest deep-dive interview on his views on the economy is highly disturbing. In Vance's interview last week with The Daily Wire, he sounded much more like a Mitt Romney, big-government RINO than a Trump or Ronald Reagan. Decide for yourself. Here are some of Vance's misguided views on economics and the future of the GOP:...

Aforce of 10,000 inspectors is being recruited to weed out foreigners: door-to-door across the nation, they will check mines, factories and shops, rounding up those without papers for deportation. Oh, and the target will be black people! Trump madness? Marine le Pen? No, this is South Africa and a project launched by President Cyril Ramaphosa to expel millions of black migrants from across the rest of Africa who have jumped the border or overstayed their visa. It’s Africa’s answer to ICE, though you won’t find many people protesting: quite the opposite. Government and the police are desperate to demonstrate they’re...

John Staddon, professor emeritus of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University, brings unusual precision to a subject that has long been governed more by social convention than by rigorous inquiry in his work, Inevitable Differences: An Inquiry into Human Variation (Academica Press, 2026). His background in experimental psychology and quantitative methods equips him to examine the empirical literature on group differences with a dispassion rarely found in this field. The result is a book that challenges, on both philosophical and empirical grounds, the dominant egalitarian framework shaping contemporary debates on race and inequality.That framework rests substantially on John Rawls, whose...

A sanctioned Russian LNG tanker from the Portovaya project idled near Singapore in May 2026 with no buyer. At the same time, Ukrainian drones had already knocked roughly 700,000 barrels per day of Russian refining capacity offline across 16 major facilities. Europe had locked in a binding legal phase-out of Russian gas. And just four months earlier, U.S. forces had captured Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela.

Pennsylvania and Virginia recently passed legislation to increase their minimum wage to $15 per hour, closing the gap with Oregon ($15.55 as of July 1) and California ($17.90 in some places). In all, 34 states mandate a minimum wage higher than the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. The potential economic detriments of a minimum wage — namely, job losses — are well known. But the trend toward higher and higher minimum wages ought to prompt us to reconsider their purpose. The standard assumption about progressivism is that it’s intrinsically good — after all, who would oppose progress? Progressivism...

Artificial intelligence revolution is meant to bring unprecedented efficiency and boundless productivity for the tech landscape by cutting the costs. But the promise of revolution is currently hitting a stark fiscal reality marked by unexpected AI-related costs, leading to the burning of budget tech companies designed for 2026 year. Of all the companies, Uber and Microsoft are grappling with AI budget overruns. For instance, Microsoft recently has decided to rescind its internal Claude code license along with its Experiences and Devices division ending access by June 30, 2026. The decision to cancel the pilot has been taken only after 6...

Dr. Li Meng Yan was on the Joe Hoft Show at 93.3 on Friday. At the end of the interview, Dr. Yan made a HUGE statement. President Trump was destroying China’s plans of world domination and China’s economy. We saw this back in early 2020. The US economy was setting records for the greatest economy in history, it had nearly doubled China’s. If there ever was a reason for China to drop a bioweapon, the fact that China’s economy was imploding and Trump’s economy was the greatest ever, was enough reason for China to drop the COVID-19 bioweapon intentionally. On...

President Trump’s top economic adviser claimed Sunday that economic growth this year could clock in north of an explosive 6%, close to triple the expectations of most mainstream forecasts. White House Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett theorized that the recent capital-spending surge in March, which appears to be driven in part by an artificial intelligence-related investment bonanza from corporations, will turbocharge growth. “I think we really could be looking at numbers north of 4, north of 5, north of even 6 because there’s so much capital stock growth right now,” Hassett told Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures” when asked about...

California used to be a place where you could get ahead. Work hard, save up, buy your first home, and build a life. That path is disappearing. A generation ago, buying your first home was something many Californians could imagine doing in their 20s. Today, the median first-time homebuyer is 40. Today, first-time buyers are being shut out of the market entirely. The homes that do get built are too big, too expensive, and completely out of reach for young, middle-class families. Starter homes, the foundation of a healthy housing market, have almost vanished. That’s not just a housing issue....

MOSCOW, April 22 (Reuters) - The veteran leader of Russia's Communist Party has warned parliament that the ​country's faltering economy risks stoking a 1917-style revolution and that the government needs to take urgent measures to correct ‌its course. Gennady Zyuganov, 81, issued his warning to a plenary session of the State Duma, the lower house of parliament, ahead of a parliamentary election due in September, according to a recording of his speech posted on the Duma's official website. "We’re doing everything we can to support (President Vladimir) Putin and his ​strategy and policies, but you (the government) are not listening,"...

WASHINGTON, D.C. — White House economists estimate the United States has a shortage of 10 million houses, according to a new report out Monday — and say regulatory cuts could lead to more construction to stabilize prices, increase home ownership and fuel faster economic growth. Trump has signaled that taming high housing costs is a top priority for his administration. The housing chapter of the annual economic report, obtained by The Associated Press before its release, lays out a blueprint for how more home construction would help the middle class and the overall economy, setting up an argument that Trump...

The weather might have been extreme this winter in Manhattan, but the snow didn’t stop deep-pocketed home buyers, according to a host of market reports released this week. In the first quarter, demand for homes across the New York City borough priced between $10 million and $20 million jumped, with transactions surging 47.4% compared to the same time last year, according to data from Compass. “Despite broader market slowdowns, the luxury market continued to outperform expectations,” the report, released Tuesday, said. Townhouses in particular had a strong start to the year, according to Jonathan Miller, president and CEO of Miller...

Some analysts say the economic effects of Operation Epic Fury in Iran could persist for years, even after the strikes end. Oil prices have climbed since Operation Epic Fury began, with WTI crude futures closing at $98.32 on Friday, up more than $30 from $67.02 on Feb. 27 — the day before the conflict with Iran began — according to Investing.com. “Productive capacity will be offline for an uncomfortably long time, meaning energy prices are likely to fall much slower than they rose,” Kyle Rodda, a senior analyst for the online trading platform Capital.com, told Axios, referring to an Israeli...