Tag Archives: policy

It Isn’t Just Our Own Progressives….

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In an interview with Spiegel Online International, ex-Greek Prime Minister Giorgios Papandreou had this to say in response to Spiegel‘s question of where fault lies for the present crisis:

…we need strict budgetary discipline, and we have to reduce expenditures, but we also need growth strategies. And we cannot lose sight of the markets, either. It is unacceptable that they are the ones driving the countries…not giving their governments the time that democratic institutions need. This undermines our democratic foundation. That’s why we need strict regulation of the markets and more transparency, and why we have to contain the rating agencies. We, as socialists, have demanded this again and again, because we cannot do this alone as a single country. This is a mistake being made by the global political class and, in particular, by conservative Europe.

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Can We Afford This?

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The International Monetary Fund, reports Belmont Club, is being lined up bail out Italy and Spain to the tune of an $800 billion aid package.  With the US as the IMF’s largest contributor, our “share” of this works out to more than $140 billion.  Can we afford this bailout (I won’t go into “after all the other bailouts” in which our government—we—have participated, both domestically and foreign)?  As an old econ professor of mine used to ask, “Suppose not?”  That is, what are the consequences of our not participating in this new bailout scheme?

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Insurance, Bonds, Risk, and Welfare

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Insurance policies and bonds are quite similar in an important respect: they both are instruments used by industries that are founded on the transfer of risk from one person or entity to another in return for a fee of some sort, a fee which most often is characterized by an ongoing transfer payments from the one transferring the risk to the other accepting the risk.  The policies and bonds are the documents that represent these exchanges of risk and fee.

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Government-Guaranteed Loans and Taxes

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This is a brief tale of taxes and loans as they apply to American education.

In a time when our governments think the answer to correcting our public education system’s decades-long failure to improve our children’s education, as demonstrated by poor and unimproving standard test scores, is to continue their decades-long practice of throwing our taxpayer money at the system (what was it that Albert Einstein said about doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results…?), some of our state governments, and the good citizens therein, are rejecting the idea and doing something different.

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Keynesian Spending vs. Personal Spending

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In this post, I want to talk about two fundamentally different views of spending in an American economy.

One view of spending is Keynesian: any spending is stimulative, and so government’s (stimulative) spending helps a stagnant economy break out of its stagnation.  Further, only government has the resources to provide the size of spending stimulus needed to break a downward cycle.

Thus, if we have a Keynesian stimulus of, say, the $800 billion of an Obama Stimulus bill, or the similar-sized aggregated stimulus spending of a New Deal 80 years, or so, ago, we would expect to see a stagnating, if not sharply contracting, economy break out of its doldrums and return to solid growth.  Yet we did not, in either case.

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America’s Future—Foreign Policy Principles, Part II

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In an earlier post, I wrote about the necessity of redefining the basic principles of American foreign policy in order to have a successful future.  In that post, I also expanded on one of them, the need for American national interests to come ahead of all other considerations in our global relations.  In this post, I’d like to talk about another of those principles, the need to support our friends and allies.

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Education in America

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Here, courtesy of The Wall Street Journal, are some alarming data that give insight into the state of today’s education system and the state of our pupils in it.

“Overall, only 45% of 2011 U.S. high-school graduates who took the ACT test were prepared for college-level math and only 30% of ACT-tested high-school graduates were ready for college-level science, according to a 2011 report by ACT Inc.” the article says.  Further, “Students who drop out of science majors and professors who study the phenomenon say that introductory courses are often difficult and abstract.”

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GPS Tracking, Privacy, and the Government

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Today, the Supreme Court began hearing a case, United States v Jones, concerning among other things, whether the police need a warrant to plant a GPS tracker on a suspect’s car: is doing so without a warrant a violation of the suspect’s 4th Amendment rights? Is even the mere use of such a device a violation of the suspect’s 4th Amendment rights?

The government makes the following arguments, among others:

the device “did not meaningfully interfere” with Jones’s property rights, because it didn’t affect the Jeep’s gas mileage, drivability or other characteristics.

and

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America’s Future—Foreign Policy Principles, Part I

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In the next few posts on America’s future, I’ll explore what our foreign policy should entail if we’re to have a successful future as a nation.  In order to identify that policy, though, it’s necessary to understand our purpose, and what our principles are, in the conduct of our foreign policy.  Accordingly, in this post and the next, I’ll talk about our necessary foreign policy principles.  In a later post, I’ll discuss what a foreign policy structure might be that would make our efforts more efficient and more effective in satisfying these principles.  Note that this will not be a restructuring of our Department of State, but of the principles that State should satisfy.

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What Can We Learn from Europe?

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Between 1995 and 2008, which is prior to the onset of the current Panic, goods prices inflated by 67% on average in Greece, and by 56%, 47%, and 41% in Spain, Portugal, and Italy, respectively, in that same period.  German prices inflated by 9% over those years.  The difference between the PIGS and Germany centered on the nations’ domestic policies.

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