Is Anyone Smart Enough to use Inflation & the Public Debt to Manage the Economy?
2024-04-17
Last week I posted something on how business confidence affects capital investment. Many factors may affect business confidence. The psychological mindset of business owners might change on its own. Public policies may affect business confidence too. Scholars at the University of Chicago developed an economic policy uncertainty index, which estimates our felt ambiguity regarding public policies1. The next graph depicts lagged effects of year over year changes in policy uncertainty on year on year changes in gross private domestic investment.As one might expect, higher levels of policy uncertainty correlate with lower levels of private investment (by 27%). Economic theory posits that fiscal and monetary policies work best when the public doesn’t know what to expect next.
The Double-Edged Sword of School Choice
2024-02-09
School Choice has become a hot button political topic, especially for right-wing America. Conservatives, libertarians, and everyone that is to the left of the Democratic Party have grown increasingly more skeptical of the public education system. Between ideological indoctrination, what might be rightfully described as “grooming” into social contagions, and declining educational gains, public education has demonstrated its utter failures.
The obvious alternative to many conservatives and libertarians is school choice. School choice has a variety of forms, but all are focused on a core idea: that government funding of schools should follow students (rather than go directly to districts) to allow competition between schools. Surely, it does follow that allowing choice might improve quality.
Forget Being the World’s Policeman; the Federal Government Can’t Even Keep DC Safe
2024-02-07
As the US federal government works to “bring peace” to the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and East Asia, it faces a rather embarrassing problem. There is currently a historic wave of violent crime battering the residents of Washington, DC.
With 274 homicides, 2023 was the deadliest year for the city since the 1990s. Shootings, carjackings, and armed robberies also jumped in the nation’s capital.
Parts of DC have been unsafe for a long time, but the violence is now affecting areas typically considered much safer. And members of the federal government are personally feeling it.
Last February, Representative Angie Craig (D-MN) was assaulted in the elevator of her Washington apartment building. The following month, a staffer for Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) was stabbed multiple times about a mile