Whirlpool has Washington in a spin cycle on December 18, 2017A household appliance will be the next stepping-stone on America’s path to restored greatness. The government is poised to punish many Americans, in the name of protecting a few of them, because, in the government’s opinion, too many of them are choosing to buy foreign-made washing machines for no better reason than that the buyers […]
Planning for the future is impossible. It’s also this man’s job on October 23, 2017Kevin Hassett evidently has not received the memo that economics is “the dismal science.” The ebullient chairman of President Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers is relishing the intellectual feast of applying to policymaking the predictive tools of a science that was blindsided by the Great Recession. Economists, like other scientists, learn things even when – […]
Let America plunge towards our fast-unfolding future on June 26, 2017In 1859, when Manhattan still had many farms, near the Battery on the island’s southern tip the Great American Tea Company was launched. It grew, and outgrew its name, becoming in 1870 the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, which in 1912 begat the first A&P Economy Store, a semi-modern grocery store. By 1920, there […]
How we waste a massive amount of infrastructure money before building even starts on June 12, 2017Sensing that his Scottish enemies had blundered at the Battle of Dunbar in 1650, Oliver Cromwell said, “The Lord hath delivered them into our hands.” Philip K. Howard, were he the exulting type, could rejoice that some of his adversaries have taken a stand on indefensible terrain. Because the inaccurately named Center for American Progress […]
Big government sneakily gets bigger on March 5, 2017In 1960, when John Kennedy was elected president, America’s population was 180 million and it had approximately 1.8 million federal bureaucrats (not counting uniformed military personnel and postal workers). Fifty-seven years later, with seven new Cabinet agencies, and myriad new sub-Cabinet agencies (e.g., the Environmental Protection Agency), and a slew of matters on the federal […]
Big government sneakily gets bigger on February 26, 2017In 1960, when John Kennedy was elected president, America’s population was 180 million and it had approximately 1.8 million federal bureaucrats (not counting uniformed military personnel and postal workers). Fifty-seven years later, with seven new Cabinet agencies, and myriad new sub-Cabinet agencies (e.g., the Environmental Protection Agency), and a slew of matters on the federal […]
A plan to make America 1953 again on January 2, 2017It is axiomatic that if someone is sufficiently eager to disbelieve something, there is no Everest of evidence too large to be ignored. This explains today’s revival of protectionism, which is a plan to make America great again by making it 1953 again. This was when manufacturing’s postwar share of the labor force peaked at […]
On day one, Trump should find these two measures on his desk on November 21, 2016Seventeen days before President Donald Trump, his spoken oath of office still lingering in the wintry air, lifts his left hand from scripture (a leather-bound edition of “The Art of the Deal”), the Republican-controlled Congress will begin working. Fittingly, on Jan. 3, the “first branch” of government will go first, flexing its somewhat atrophied Article […]
Americas quiet catastrophe: Millions of idle men on October 10, 2016 The “quiet catastrophe” is particularly dismaying because it is so quiet, without social turmoil or even debate. It is this: After 88 consecutive months of the economic expansion that began in June 2009, a smaller percentage of American males in the prime working years (ages 25 to 54) are working than were working near […]
‘Brexit’ vote is Britain’s chance to declare indepenence on June 6, 2016Leaders of the campaign to end Britain’s membership in the European Union hope that next month’s referendum will make June 23, 2016, a date as luminous in modern British history as May 3, 1979, when voters made Margaret Thatcher prime minister. Michael Gove, secretary of justice and leader of the campaign for Brexit – Britain’s […]