Showing posts with label Economics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Economics. Show all posts

Sunday, January 18, 2015

Euphoria...again

January 18, 2015 AP , Brandon Bailey 0 Comments
VC Firms Rain Down Cash On Tech Startups, Is Bubble Brewing?

Brandon Bailey, Jan. 16, 2015, AP

Uber Technologies, the ride-hailing service disrupting the transportation industry and generating plenty of press, received the top two biggest rounds of investment last year. Each raised $1.2 billion for Uber, and the company's value is now pegged at $41 billion. Other major deals included $542 million (mostly from Google Inc.) invested in Magic Leap Inc., a secretive startup working on virtual reality technology; $500 million in Vice Media, which operates online news and video channels; and $485 million in SnapChat, the popular messaging service.

Read more: abcnews.go.com

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too much dope; not enough dopers

January 18, 2015 AP , Economics 0 Comments
Too Much Pot: Growers Struggle With Glut Of Legal Weed

Gene Johnson, Jan. 15, 2015, AP

State data show that licensed growers had harvested 31,000 pounds of bud as of Thursday, but Washington's relatively few legal pot shops have sold less than one-fifth of that. Many of the state's marijuana users have stuck with the untaxed or much-lesser-taxed pot they get from black market dealers or unregulated medical dispensaries — limiting how quickly product moves off the shelves of legal stores.

"Every grower I know has got surplus inventory and they're concerned about it," said Scott Masengill, who has sold half of the 280 pounds he harvested from his pot farm in central Washington. "I don't know anybody getting rich."

Read more: www.komonews.com

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Friday, September 5, 2014

Bogus study is STILL cited by leftists

September 05, 2014 Alan Krueger , Carrie L. Lukas 0 Comments
Krueger’s Faulty Minimum-Wage Study
Alan Krueger
By Carrie L. Lukas, Aug. 30, 2014, Nationalreview.com

After President Obama tapped Princeton University professor Alan Krueger to chair the Council of Economic Advisors, Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein wrote that Krueger “is arguably the leading labor economist in the country” and “known for bringing a near-superhuman rigor” to the subject.

One wonders how any economist would earn a “near-superhuman” superlative for their research. One can particularly wonder in the case of Professor Krueger, who is known for his 1990s academic research that attempted to prove that employee wages were not subject to the laws of supply and demand.

In 1993, Krueger and David Card published a study that examined employment statistics of fast-food restaurants in New Jersey and Pennsylvania following the Garden State’s minimum wage hike. The authors reported that employment at fast-food chains in New Jersey increased by 13 percent compared to restaurants across the Delaware River in Pennsylvania. Clinton administration Labor secretary Robert Reich, Senator Kerry, Senator Kennedy, and other luminaries of the Left pointed to the study’s findings to call for raising the minimum wage.

But analysis by independent researchers revealed the Krueger-Card report, which was based on a phone survey in which fast food restaurant managers and assistant managers were asked about their staff size, to be deeply flawed. The Employment Policy Institute analyzed the phone survey results against actual payroll data from the restaurants and concluded that “the data set used in the New Jersey study bears no relation to numbers drawn from payroll records of the restaurants the New Jersey study claims to cover.”

Read the full story:  www.nationalreview.com

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Monday, August 25, 2014

FLASHBACK: Barack Hollande By Larry Elder

August 25, 2014 Articles by Larry Elder , Economics 0 Comments
French Jobless=12%; 0 Growth; We Warned Them!!

French President Francois Hollande with President Barack Obama
Source:  townhall.com

By Larry Elder, Jun. 28, 2012
Did the French just elect a self-described socialist who wants to raise taxes on the rich? Yes, they did. Is President Barack Obama asking for four more years with an economic philosophy similar to that of the new French president? Yes, he is.

In France, those earning over a million euros would face a tax rate of 75 percent. And one of Francois Hollande's first acts as new president of France was to reverse his predecessor's course and lower the retirement age from 62 to 60 -- this in a country whose projected unfunded pension liabilities for its living citizens are about $8.37 trillion, or 300 percent of its $2.774 trillion gross domestic product. The United States' unfunded Social Security, Medicare and prescription drug benefits liability for its living citizens is about $50 trillion, or 333 percent of our current $15 trillion GDP.

France is a county whose debt is 90 percent of its GDP (U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio is over 100 percent). It had zero GDP growth in the first quarter of 2012 and has an unemployment rate of 10.2 percent. Taxes, as a percent of GDP, are 56 percent. (U.S. state, local and federal tax take is 33 percent of GDP, excluding the dollar value of government-issued mandates on the private sector).
France is a mess. Hollande, like Obama, pays no attention to the many examples of government-controlled economies versus those where government takes less from people and relies on the private sector to create jobs.
Let's look at just one such example. Hong Kong became a British colony following the first Opium War in the mid-1800s. As mainland China fell to communist control a century later, many Chinese migrants and corporations fled to the island. In 1961, Britain named Sir John Cowperthwaite, a proponent of the Austrian school of free-market economics, as financial secretary of Hong Kong. Residents of Hong Kong faced a maximum 15 percent in personal taxes, no tariffs, no subsidies, no government borrowing and minimal red tape. Cowperthwaite called it "positive non-intervention."
Hong Kong, under his guidance, saw a 50 percent rise in wages and a two-thirds fall in the number of households in acute poverty. Exports rose by 14 percent a year, as Hong Kong evolved from a trading post to a major regional hub and manufacturing base. Hong Kong is a water-surrounded rock with no natural resources -- other than the industry of its people.
In his first budget speech, Cowperthwaite said: "In the long run, the aggregate of decisions of individual businessmen, exercising individual judgment in a free economy, even if often mistaken, is less likely to do harm than the centralized decisions of a government, and certainly the harm is likely to be counteracted faster."
About Hong Kong, economist Milton Friedman wrote: "At the end of World War II, Hong Kong was a dirt-poor island with a per-capita income about one-quarter that of Britain's. By 1997, when sovereignty was transferred to China, its per-capita income was roughly equal to that of the departing colonial power. ... That was a striking demonstration of the productivity of freedom, of what people can do when they are left free to pursue their own interests."
In the U.S., we watch the spectacle of Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, explaining to Congress why his company lost $2 billion in private money. Meanwhile, the federal government squanders many times more by "investing" public money in now-bankrupt or soon-to-be bankrupt "green" companies.
After nearly four years of spending with dismal results, Obama blames the results on an "inherited" economy that was worse than he thought. He also blames the dastardly Republicans for stopping him from spending the requisite amount of money to get things right.
Bill Clinton, too, pushed for a federal takeover of health care. In fact, everything ObamaCare purports to achieve HillaryCare set out to do. But when Clinton saw negative polls on HillaryCare and realized he overreached, he backed up.
Obama saw that parts of ObamaCare polled well, like refusing to allow rejection based on pre-existing illness and requiring insurance companies to cover the "children" of policyholders. To keep the costs down, Obama called for an individual mandate, believing that to "bend the cost curve" he must require young, healthy types to get insurance or pay a fee for not doing so. Obama assumed that once people took a closer look at ObamaCare, resistance would fade. It hasn't. If anything, ObamaCare is more unpopular now than ever.
In France, not only did the voters elect a socialist, they gave him enough seats in parliament so that his agenda can get passed without compromise. For two years, Obama had that kind of power. It gave us ObamaCare, "stimulus" and a tepid recovery.
Poor France.

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