Free Republic

It is arguably the job of any U.S. President to be our cheerleader-in-chief. That’s why President Obama’s recent comments blasting the business community for being asleep at the switch have the rest of the country reeling. “We’ve been a little bit lazy over the last couple of decades. We’ve kind of taken for granted — ‘Well, people would want to come here’ — and we aren’t out there hungry, selling America and trying to attract new businesses into America,” he told the corporate chiefs who gathered at the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit. But with millions of Americans out of...

On September 12, the pioneering Rep. Thaddeus McCotter introduced trailblazing legislation providing workers the freedom to choose personal savings and investment accounts to finance half of their future Social Security benefits. This legislation would completely solve the future Social Security financing problem, without cutting benefits or raising taxes, as officially scored by the Chief Actuary of Social Security. Indeed, because standard, long-term market investment returns are so much higher than what Social Security even promises, workers with personal accounts will enjoy higher rather than lower benefits. Moreover, the legislation would result in the greatest reduction in government spending in world...

Believe it or not, a place exists where companies are hiring like crazy, and you can make $15 an hour serving tacos, $25 an hour waiting tables and $80,000 a year driving trucks. You just have to move to North Dakota. Specifically, to one of the tiny towns surrounding the oil-rich Bakken formation, estimated to hold anywhere between 4 billion and 24 billion barrels of oil. Oil companies have only recently discovered ways to tap this reserve. And along with the manpower needed to extract the oil, the town is now scrambling to find workers to support the new rush...

Andrew Sullivan is right.I thought my hand would wither when I wrote this, but I must confess he is right.There has been a spate of interesting stories in the last week about the prosperity gospel. The Guardian has a nice piece on the indictment on fraud charges by Brazilian prosecutors of the king of the prosperity gospel preachers, Bishop Edir Macedor. And writing in The Daily Beast, Andrew Sullivan’s Dish column discusses the existential mindset of the Republican Party. He offers his readers the ‘prosperity gospel’ as one explanation for its militant mood.But let us first define our terms. What...

Among the colossal fallacies that keep our economy mired in unemployment, few loom as large as the notion that "creating" jobs leads to growth and prosperity, rather than the other way around. In fact, when jobs are treated as ends rather than means, the perverse effect of pursuing policies designed to artificially inflate employment figures only serves to make things worse. This conflation of cause and effect lies at the heart of entire schools of economics - a science made more dismal by the fact that whenever policy prescriptions fail to deliver their promised benefits, the proposed remedy is to...

On the day we arrived in Washington, April 12, 1997, we tuned in to C-Span just in time to see the House of Representatives pass H.400 on a voice vote. Not one member of the House of Representatives demanded a roll call vote on a bill that would severely emasculate a core function of the federal government. When we were finally able to obtain a copy of S.507, we read it very carefully and we were horrified. Never in all of our years as lobbyists had we ever read a worse piece of legislation. If we had ever wondered what...

Democrats have controlled the Senate and the White House since the election of 2008, and the House of Representatives up until this year.  Certainly they could have passed any budget they desired, including one with tax increases and spending increases.  But they chose to ignore the 800-day gorilla in the room because they don't want to be on record supporting a budget that actually does what they want.  Then the public could hold them accountable for their cowardly and irresponsible behavior in the face of national fiscal calamity.  

The media is hyping and harping on the issue that the Federal Reserve will resort to PRINTING more money to feed another round of “quantitative easing.” This is a wholly incorrect fact. The Department of Treasury prints our "paper currency” NOT the Federal Reserve. “Quantitative easing” is the Federal Reserve increasing bank reserves- thereby creating new money electronically- but, for a stated purpose of “stimulating” the economy and NOT for paying government debt. This is a salient point that the media mixes up, assuming and misinforming the public that QE is paying for increased government debts. QE serves a fundamental...

Presidential Press Secretary Jay Carney boasted to a skeptical media that “the economy is a lot better than everyone thinks it is. The focus on high unemployment, bankruptcies, and foreclosures misses the big picture.” Carney declined to get down to specifics on what the so-called “big picture” entails. “It all boils down to the simple question Reagan posed in the 1980 election,” Carney contended. “All the American people need do is ask themselves whether they are better off now than they were before President Obama took office. Once they recall the hopelessness that prevailed under Bush and the Republicans the...

In December 2010, we released a working paper on fiscal consolidations accompanied by a Wall Street Journal op-ed, both co-authored with our AEI colleague Kevin Hassett. The goal was to analyze what worked—and what didn't—in balancing national budgets. The paper’s findings have generated some interest, including being cited approvingly by congressional Republicans and critiqued by one of the Economist magazine’s Free Exchange bloggers. Our methodology was straightforward. We studied over 20 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries for a period spanning nearly four decades. We first isolated instances in which countries took steps to address their budget gaps. These...

New park in Fayetteville has words in Constitution wrongBy NBC17 Staff Associated Press Published: July 07, 2011 FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. - This one truth is self-evident: the preamble to the Constitution etched on glass panels at a Fayetteville park contains a significant error. The Fayetteville Observer reports that etched into a set of dark glass panels at North Carolina Veterans Park are the 52 words to the preamble to the U.S. Constitution. However, the word "prosperity" appears in place of the correct word, "posterity." City officials said they discovered the mistake Wednesday after someone called them and wrote about it on...

Citi On Why This Is A Great Opportunity To Buy Into "The Grind Higher" Gregory White Jun. 30, 2011, 8:12 AM If you think we're beginning to see the light at the end of this recent equity downturn, you're not alone. Citi analysts write that while a slowdown in leading indicators and the crisis in Europe are currently frightening investors, this sort of slowdown in the middle of an economic cycle is normal, and we should come out of it. Further, EPS growth is going to continue, and that's good news for stocks. Investors may be underestimating two factors that...

Yes. You Can.- By: Larry Walker, Jr. -According to Barack Obama, "We can’t simply cut our way to prosperity." Prior historical references: Unknown. Upon hearing such an absurd statement, and being of the homo economicus persuasion, my first instinct is to define what it means to me, and then to determine whether it has any relevance in my life. If we are honest, we must each define what the word prosperity, or rich, means to us. Only after we have defined its meaning are we able to chart a course.In the WikiHow.com article, “How to get rich,” there are seven...

When Ronald Reagan was elected President of the United States in 1980, I was 32 years old. I was frustrated with my initial experiences in the world of business, not in small measure because of the previous four years of The Carter Malaise and the sense that my first hand experience of the political perfidy that pervaded the end of The VietNam War had somehow become part and parcel of American foreign policy and military strategy. To be a cog in the machine of the late 70’s economy was to be constantly in motion, always under pressure and sorely lacking...

The idea to make the precious metal legal tender has gained currency in more than a dozen state capitals, aided by Tea Party support and other efforts to rein in federal power. Economists say the plan would be disastrous. Mike Pitts is no economist, but that hasn't kept the retired small-town cop from taking a prominent role in a quixotic campaign to push the U.S. monetary system back to another century. Pitts, a South Carolina statehouse representative, introduced a bill in April that would make gold and silver coins legal tender in the state. Similar efforts are underway in more...

America has forgotten her roots and the limited government which produced the greatest mixture of freedom and prosperity in history. Like their modern counterparts, the first tea partiers sensed this. They rejected a government that betrayed its ideals. Today’s Tea Party primarily focuses on the economic aspects of government expansion, but even as prosperity is a profound blessing, it is freedom we must defend. When King George demanded we buy his tea, colonists objected. Astonished at their outrage, Parliament authored tax subsidies to contrive consent. It became a test of wills over sovereignty. Was the king supreme or did justice...

Trade: A big order for Made-In-America aircraft briefly lifted stocks last week and, better yet, will create jobs. One source? Tiny Chile, a nation with a free trade treaty. What's that again about such pacts exporting U.S. jobs? Thursday, 10 orders for Boeing's most advanced aircraft were added to the U.S. aircraft maker's order book. Half of the 10 came from Germany's big Lufthansa airline, and the rest came from LAN, a relatively new airline based in small, faraway Chile. Besides the attention-getting rise in stocks, thousands of Americans will get jobs, not just at Boeing, but at its suppliers,...

WASHINGTON – The officially atheist Chinese government is surprisingly open to Christianity, at least partially, because it sees a link between the faith and economic success, said a sought after scholar who has relations with governments in Asia. China believes that Christianity is responsible for much of the historic success of Western Europe and the United States, said Dr. William Jeynes, senior fellow of The Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, N.J., during a presentation at the Family Research Council on Tuesday. But while the Chinese government is open to Christianity, it also “wants to control Christianity.” Those in authority are very...

Economics: As the U.S. languishes, Chile posted a head-turning 15.2% yearly gain in GDP in March, and forecasts for the year are rising. Why can't we do that here? A year ago, Chile lay in rubble, victim of the world's fifth most powerful earthquake. So Chile's 15.2% growth is a big bounce from a bad setback. But it shouldn't be dismissed as an anomaly. It's a showy number, but not the only one. The same day Chile released its data, Goldman Sachs raised its 2011 growth forecast for the country to 6.4% from 6%. In its annual regional business index,...

The House on Friday approved a fiscal year 2012 budget resolution from Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) that seeks to drastically limit government spending next year and in years to follow. But the vote on the measure — which imposes $5.8 trillion in spending cuts over the next decade — came after a clear sign that at least half of the Republican Caucus supports even tougher spending cuts. The final tally was 235-193, with four Republicans opposing it. Every Democrat voted "no."