If you are bothered by rising food costs, there are some simple steps you can take: Go out to eat less. Make more meals from scratch. But wait, you might reply. Aren’t some of the sharpest price increases in staple…
Category: Other
Ryan deserves kudos for laying out a plan, if not its details
House budget chair Paul Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin, deserves to be congratulated for his courage in putting a concrete deficit reduction proposal on the table. I don’t agree with many features of his plan, but Ryan’s willingness to lay out…
Dollar’s domination comes at a price
You have to hand it to Ben Bernanke, he can bring together people from across the political spectrum. In response to the Fed’s aggressive creation of new bank reserves over the past three years, Chinese communists and French conservatives join…
Farming, mining still pay — just not as many
Sixty years ago, many people argued that poor countries had to reduce their dependence on exporting products from mines and farms because the prices of these primary commodities were locked into inevitable permanent decline relative to the manufactured goods the…
Reasons for ballooning entitlement spending complex
Cutting entitlement spending is all the rage right now. That is good, because it will be impossible to put the nation’s finances on a sustainable footing without changes in the major entitlement programs. But much of the rhetoric on the…
Government actions always create winners and losers
Government actions affect businesses and decrease or increase the value of people’s property all the time. That is an issue right now as Central Corridor light rail line construction in St. Paul starts to bite University Avenue businesses, at least…
Will the Bank of Japan’s burst of liquidity work?
The tsunami that has devastated coastal areas of northeastern Japan has a recent precedent — the tsunami of Dec. 26, 2004, in the Indian Ocean that killed some 230,000 people. But there is no precedent for the wave of money…
Japan’s triple whammy a definitive exogenous shock
One of the many layers of the evolving tragedy in Japan is that it illustrates how an exogenous shock can hit a nation’s economy. The physical damage already is severe. Until the ongoing nuclear plant emergency is fully played out,…
Vaccinate one child and many benefit
As usual, Minnesota is above the national average in the proportions of children who are vaccinated against infectious diseases, according to a news item this week. Unfortunately, those proportions are declining, and we are not so far above the average…
America’s incredibly shrinking labor pool
The proportion of adults in the labor force is dropping in Minnesota and the nation as a whole. That raises a host of questions. Is this a bad sign for our economy? Is it an effect of the economic slowdown…