“To say that the economy has suffered as a result of the partial shutdown is not a serious presumption. Those who think the partial shutdown weighed on growth are losing sight of one key fact– the federal government has no resources.”
While some readers of this column are perhaps already familiar with this historical anecdote, it’s worth repeating every now and then that as recently as the year 2000, the state of Ohio had more paved roads than all of Russia combined. Please think about that for a minute. Ohio, a seemingly middle-of-the-economic-pack U.S. state, not too long ago had more paved roads than a country that is eleven time zones large.
According to Congressional Budget Office (CBO) data, the federal government spent $3.9 trillion in 2017. In Argentina, total federal spending in 2017 was $161 billion.
Busy Bee’s is a popular destination for parents of young children in the Washington, D.C. area. Its two locations are especially packed on cold days thanks to its indoor playgrounds that include balloon pits, swinging chairs and slides. No doubt there are play concepts like Busy Bee’s all over the U.S., just as there are businesses similar to it throughout D.C.
Back in 2010, and amid a particularly difficult stretch for the economy, a conservative economist teamed up with lefty economist Dean Baker in support of what they referred to as “work sharing.” As the duo put it at the time, “Under a work-sharing program, firms are encouraged by government policy to spread a small amount of the pain across many workers. In a typical arrangement, a worker might see his weekly hours go down by 20%, and his salary go down by about 4%.”
Washington is buzzing right now with talk of tax cuts. There’s good and bad in what the Republicans are proposing, and odds are that what looks and feels like tax reform will be signed into law by President Trump before 2017 closes.
Here’s a truly rhetorical question: who among us would reject higher compensation? Our work is our expression of our desire to get, and higher pay is the path to getting more in return for what we do each day.
On March 30, 1981, the Times of London published a letter signed by 364 prominent economists that predicted disaster for England under Margaret Thatcher’s economic policies. Reality has a way of removing the clothes of the so-called experts in rather embarrassing fashion.
During speeches while President of the Cato Institute, John Allison would often say that there were “thousands of Googles” before Google. Allison’s point was that the company which has come to define search technology wasn’t the only Silicon Valley start-up to attain funding based on its idea for a search engine. Countless start-ups funded, countless failures, and lots of learning from those failures, led to Google.
When the 21st century began Apple was just a few years removed from near bankruptcy, Microsoft, after a few wasted years fighting off a Department of Justice eager to neuter it, was on the verge of a fifteen-year span during which its share price almost literally stood still, Google was a small private company reliant on word of mouth about its nascent search engine, Amazon was a peddler of books, CDs, VHS videos and DVDs (its shares were soon to plummet into the $1 range), and Facebook didn’t even exist. Founder Mark Zuckerberg was still in high school.
