William Graham Sumner In 1883, William Graham Sumner wrote a series of essays for Harper’s Weekly, which paid him $50 apiece. The excerpted essay below on “The Forgotten Man” is as relevant today as in 1883—even more so. Politicians continue to pile more burdens on ordinary people in the name of this or that professed well-intentioned cause, but it’s the ordinary working man and woman who pays the taxes, suffers under government regulatory and redistribution schemes, and would do much better if government simply secured “true liberty” and otherwise left them alone. Bernie, Hillary, and …
Canada risks missing the boat on liquefied natural gas, Cross tells CBC
Macdonald-Laurier Institute Macdonald-Laurier Institute – Canada’s leading public policy think tank The world’s investors aren’t going to wait for Canada to get its act together on liquefied natural gas, MLI Senior Fellow Philip Cross… Canada risks missing the boat on liquefied natural gas, Cross tells CBC Mark Brownlee Related posts: A carbon tax will have economic http://www.macdonaldlaurier.ca
Peter Boettke’s Splendid Essays on Learning and Teaching Economics
I have just finished reading Living Economics: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, a wonderful collection of essays by Peter Boettke. (It was published in 2012, but I move slowly these days.) The essays were written over a span of some twenty years or so, most of them in the first decade of the present century or soon thereafter. Several have a co-author or two; the co-authors include Christopher Coyne, Peter Leeson, David Prychitko, Steven Horwitz, and Frederic Sautet. I read the book from cover to cover and enjoyed it from start to finish. Broadly speaking, the …
Can Banks Disrupt the Payday Lending Business?
Since its inception in the 1990s, the payday lending industry has grown at an astonishing pace. Currently, there are about 22,000 payday lending locations — more than two for every Starbucks — that originate an estimated $27 billion in annual loan volume. Read more on Can Banks Disrupt the Payday Lending Business?… The post Can Banks Disrupt the Payday Lending Business? appeared first on Acton Institute PowerBlog. Related posts: Can Capitalism Save the Arts? Most Americans Aren’t Prepared for a $1,000 Unexpected Expense (But You Can Be) The Mission of Business Read more at The …
Exceptional Investment Returns Likely to End
McKinsey Global Institute recently issued a new report discussing historical and future trends in investment returns. The report finds that the total returns to financial markets in the United States and Western Europe during the past 30 years significantly outperformed the long-term 100-year average. According to the report, sharp inflation decline, Read more at Reason.org
The Real Costs of Funding Public Pensions
Public pension advocates often argue that pension costs account for only a small part of state and local spending. According to a recent report by the National Association of State Retirement Administrators, state and local governments spent only 4.1% their budgets on pension contributions in 2013. Andrew Biggs in this Read more at Reason.org
A Pension "Grand Bargain" for Distressed Cities?
In a recent paper, Howard Husock at the Manhattan Institute explores a novel approach to dealing with municipal financial distress caused by ballooning pension costs. The paper describes the philanthropic coalition that enabled Detroit to emerge from bankruptcy, and examines the possibility of applying this innovative model to four other Read more at Reason.org
New GASB Disclosures Allow More Accurate Revaluation of Pension Debt
Public pension plans have long been relying on flawed discount rates to value their liabilities, and various attempts have been made to estimate the true value of those obligations. A recent paper by pension expert Joshua D. Rauh at the Hoover Institution is among such attempts. What sets this paper Read more at Reason.org
Pension Cost Volatility and Public Staffing Levels
Stephen Eide at the Manhattan Institute in a recent paper discusses the connection between pension cost volatility and public staffing levels. The paper finds that although private-sector job employment has long surpassed its pre-recession levels, state and local government staffing remains lower than it was in 2008. Rising pension costs are Read more at Reason.org
Pension Reform: A Federal Based Proposal
Pension reform efforts in Illinois and other places have shown that it is almost impossible to reduce earned pension benefits without violating state constitutions. In this paper, Diana Furchtgott-Roth at E21 discusses possible solutions to this problem, based on the pension situation in Illinois. Illinois’s pension plans are currently underfunded by Read more at Reason.org
Opening the Doors of Justice is Critically Important
Should people affected by federal agency actions that impose over ten billion dollars of costs and impact tens of millions of acres for no benefit (and likely cause harm to the intended beneficiaries of the actions), be able to challenge such decisions in court? It’s a matter of simple fairness: Read more at Reason.org
Dedicated DC Metro Funding Makes Sense in Theory, but is Unlikely to be an Improvement in Real World
One issue that DC WMATA rail boosters are fixated on is procuring a source of dedicated revenue. Currently Metro is funded from annual appropriations. Unlike the total funding argument, rail boosters make a good case for dedicated funding, particularly from a theoretical viewpoint. Unfortunately, from a practical viewpoint switching to Read more at Reason.org
