Amid much hoopla from pundits, the Federal Reserve’s policy-making Open Market Committee met this week and left its policies largely unchanged. It will continue to reduce the rate at which it increases our nation’s money supply by buying bonds —…
Category: Other
Minimum wage hike imperfect, but it’s OK
In certain circumstances, a minimum-wage law can make an economy more efficient. In other words, the economy can produce more goods and services to meet people’s needs from the same amounts of labor, capital and natural resources. That is why,…
Bumper crop is bummer for some
It looks like the 2014 harvest of major field crops like corn and soybeans is going to be very large. It certainly will approach previous records and may set new ones. That is bad news for crop farmers since prices…
Keep Fed free to act within its discretion
Congress is considering a bill requiring the Federal Reserve to adopt a mathematical rule, such as the “Taylor Rule,” for determining monetary policy. More about the Taylor Rule later in this column, but on balance, this is a bad idea.…
Water dispute shows complexity of problems
If you are attracted by the libertarian ideas of Rand Paul, or those of Ted Cruz or Paul Ryan for that matter, you should pay attention to a little brouhaha over water rights in Nebraska. It isn’t a refutation of…
When minimum wage honesty is not the best policy
Conventional economic theory assumes that people are highly rational in many life decisions. Common sense and a growing body of formal research show this is not true, in both work and spending. Beyond this, people’s reactions to the economic actions…
Don’t go hog wild; market may fall
A recent Bloomberg News headline, “Classic Cars, Lean Hogs and Duchamp Art Lead Alternative Investment Ranking,” piqued the interest of two readers who separately emailed to ask how they could get into the reported “lean hog” bonanza. With a one…
Tying party of president to fortune is fool’s errand
The data are clear: The U.S. economy does better economically on a range of measures when a Democrat is president than when a Republican is. So what? The very question assumes a cause-effect relationship that ignores the complex interactions in…
Good intentions made bad policy
If the current influx of minors from a few Central American countries teaches us anything, it is the wisdom of Robert Burns’ paraphrased argument that, “The best laid schemes of mice and men oft go awry, and leave us nothing…
Steel ‘dumping’ lobby adds up to higher costs for society
I wonder how Sen. Amy Klobuchar would have analyzed the hog market on Sept. 28, 1970, if she hadn’t been in grade school at the time. I remember the date exactly because it was my first morning back from Vietnam.…