Earlier this month I talked about the curious increase in job openings going unfilled by businesses despite high unemployment. I learned about another example of the phenomenon this week in California, where fruits are rotting in the fields:
Continue reading California Farms and the Curious Labor Shortage
I like Todd Akin. He’s been my Congressman for many years, and while, like most Republicans, he loves defense spending too much to be a genuine “small-government conservative,” he also hasn’t been afraid to buck his party on expansionary projects like No Child Left Behind. But I sure didn’t expect him to turn his Senate race into national news.
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Continue reading Everything You Need to Know About Last Week’s News #6
Corn prices are surging to records, and farmers are slaughtering their animals earlier than usual to save on feeding them. Clearly this is a problem that calls for a government solution!
Now the government is already exacerbating corn prices with its un-environmental ethanol mandate, and there were rumors that Obama might actually suspend those requirements. After all, Bush started that one, so Obama could have blamed Bush and reduced the government’s intervention in agriculture in one fell swoop. But that would require admitting the government caused this problem in the first place, and as we all know, the only policies from the Bush administration that Obama likes are all the ones that have to do with government intervention. (See warrantless wiretapping. And indefinite detention. And that light bulb law.)
Good news! The Bureau of Labor Statistics says the number of job openings in June was the highest since 2008.
Woohoo! There are 500,000 more job openings than a year ago, and a million more than two years ago! This trend is going up and up and up!
But wait a minute. The number of actual net jobs added per month, while fluctuating quite a bit, looks pretty flat over the last couple of years.
If there’s so many more jobs these days, why aren’t more people getting hired? Continue reading So Many Job Openings, So Few Hires
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Continue reading Everything You Need To Know About Last Week’s News #5
Well, it’s official. Mitt Romney has chosen rising Congressional star Paul Ryan to be his vice-presidential running mate. Team Red is stoked that the young articulate conservative will absolutely smoke Biden in the VP debate, and Team Blue is stoked that Obama is now guaranteed to win because Ryan is obviously too extreme for most Americans. But does this mean anything for us independent fans of small-government?
Continue reading Should Libertarians Be Excited About Paul Ryan?
Ezra Klein is obsessed with Mitt Romney’s proposed budget policies, or lack thereof. Klein convincingly argues that Romney’s plans are far vaguer than many previous presidential candidates and also very dishonest and mathematically impossible. The only problem with all of this analysis is that it assumes that presidential budget proposals actually matter, an assumption Sonic Charmer ridicules with his trademark snark:
Continue reading Why So Obsessed With Presidential Budget Plans?
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Continue reading Everything You Need To Know About Last Week’s News #4
Mitt Romney still hasn’t released his tax returns, and the Democrats aren’t letting up. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid now claims he has “sources” that say Romney paid no taxes for ten years, and that it’s up to Romney to prove them wrong.
Justin Wolfers summarized the liberal logic a few weeks ago when he tweeted, “Bayesian logic: If you won’t reveal something, then I infer you have something to hide. Given this, you should only hide it if it’s terrible.”
But this is terrible reasoning built on arrogant assumptions. I don’t remember liberals being excited when the Tea Party used the same bad logic to insist that Obama reveal his birth certificate. There are multiple reasons you might not want to cooperate in this game.
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