Immigration certainly is in the news. President Bush recently addressed immigration in a major speech. In Minnesota, the Pawlenty administration released a quickly controversial report on what illegal immigrants cost state and local governments. And immigration is emerging as an…
Category: Other
How feedback can affect retail sales
Thanks to innovations in technology, measuring holiday spending is easier and faster — and the resulting news stories can influence decisions by retailers and shoppers. The upshot is that both parties behave differently from how they did 20 years ago.…
Beyond “Freakonomics”
Books on economics seldom make the New York Times best-seller list, but Steve Levitt’s “Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything” has been there for 34 weeks. Levitt, 38, grew up in the Twin Cities and graduated…
Housing boom bound to run out of steam
News that the Twin Cities area housing market cooled in October is no surprise. Sale prices for existing homes had increased sharply for two years. New construction had boomed. Neither trend was sustainable over the long run. The most important…
Medical advances involve trade-offs
Society cannot avoid facing the trade-offs involved in producing medicines and medical devices such as implantable pacemakers and defibrillators. We want these products to be effective and safe. We also want them to be as inexpensive as possible and available…
Pork-barrel politics hurt war on terror
It is easy for governments to spend money. Spending it effectively is harder. That was apparent Monday when Thomas Kean, the former governor of New Jersey who headed the Sept. 11 commission, went after homeland defense spending to date. The…
Short-term fear derails long-term gain
Long-term gains often can only be achieved by taking short-term risks. There are financial risks to starting one’s own business or buying stock in a shaky new startup firm, but there can also be rich rewards. Similarly, changing economic policies…
Sometimes, a parliament holds appeal
Despite a long common border, Minnesotans don’t pay much attention to Canadian politics. We will pay little interest to the sudden — and, by U.S. standards, very short — election campaign that will take place there over next seven weeks.…
Use state money to retrain, not retain
The rumored closing of St. Paul’s Ford plant is bad news for Ford employees and the Twin Cities economy as a whole. In the short run, employment, earnings and spending will suffer. But the effects on the overall economy are…
Tax surplus stems from business cycle
Wednesday’s announcement that Minnesota faces a $701 million budget surplus is very good news. It takes pressure off budget cuts, provides money for unanticipated high energy costs and returns some help to local governments. It also allows the Legislature to…