Jason Zweig, Wall Street Journal

Pension Puffery - 1/30/12

If you were a better stock picker than Warren Buffett, would you be punching the clock every day as the faceless manager of a corporate pension plan?

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Diana Furchgott-Roth, Washington Examiner

Obama On Oil - 1/29/12

Has the President had a change of heart on oil exploration?

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Robert Bryce, City Journal

Get Dense - 1/29/12

It’s time to stop wasting land and resources in the name of environmentalism.

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Darrell Moon, Bloomberg

Healthcare's Real Battleground - 1/26/12

The real battle for the future of health care is being fought in the world of business, where tens of thousands of companies have seen their financial well-being undermined by skyrocketing employee health costs.

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Warren Meyer, Forbes

The Energy Presidency? - 1/26/12

According to the Institute for Energy Research (IER), the Obama Administration has been issuing  oil and gas leases at the lowest pace of any president in the last 30 years – in fact at half the rate of the Clinton White House and 80% slower than in the Reagan era, dragging their feet to please the environmental lobby.

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Kay Hymowitz, City Journal

White Blight - 1/26/12

Charles Murray depicts an increasingly two-tiered white America.

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Investors Business Daily

Occupy Super Bowl - 1/24/12

Indiana unions, opposed to becoming the first right-to-work state in the Rust Belt, may disrupt Super Bowl XLVI in Indianapolis. Their unnecessary roughness will cost the Hoosiers needed jobs.

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William D. Eggers and Ruben Gonzalez, Governing Magazine

Disrupt The Public Sector - 1/23/12

We consumers have grown accustomed to better services, improved technologies, and new and different ways of doing things. It's a simple progression: Technology improves, prices drop. In one major sector of the economy, however, prices seem to just keep going up and up without a commensurate increase in performance. And that's government.

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John Steele Gordon, The American

Snapshot of Creative Destruction - 1/23/12

Kodak, Rochester, and the decline of the industrial northeast.

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David Kestenbaum and Jacob Goldstein, NPR.com

The Contract That Transformed China - 1/23/12

In 1978, the farmers in a small Chinese village called Xiaogang gathered in a mud hut to sign a secret contract allowing local families to keep more of what they produced. They thought it might get them executed. Instead, it wound up transforming China's economy in ways that are still reverberating today.

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Nicole Gelinas, City Journal

Triple A Headache - 1/20/12

S&P’s latest downgrades may split the longstanding “Merkozy” alliance.

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Peter Wallison & Edward Pinto, American Banker

The Cost of Free Money - 1/19/12

A series of uncoordinated government policies are once more setting up the U.S. banking system for major losses and possibly another financial crisis.

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Ben Boychuk, Publicsectorinc.com

Jerry Brown's California - 1/19/12

Shortly after Brown took office last year, when he was just beginning budget negotiations with the legislature, a reporter asked what might happen if his plan for a tax extension failed to reach the ballot or if voters ultimately rejected the tax proposal. His coy reply: "Some people might say I am putting a gun to their head."Voters should have no doubt which direction Brown's gun is pointed now.
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Charles Murray, New Criterion

Founding Virtues: The Class Divide - 1/18/12

As recently as half a century ago, Americans across all classes showed only minor differences on the Founding virtues. When Americans resisted the idea of being thought part of an upper class or lower class, they were responding to a reality: there really was such a thing as a civic culture that embraced all of them. Today, that is no longer true. Americans have formed a new lower class and a new upper class that have no... More

Theodore Dalrymple, City Journal

European Crack-Up - 1/17/12

Greeks aren’t Germans.

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Nicole Gelinas, New York Post

Are Rent Regulations Unconstitutional? - 1/17/12

The Supreme Court may consider a challenge to New York's rent regulation on the grounds that they violate Fifth Amendment provision that nobody can be “deprived of . . . property without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.”

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Virginia Postrel, Bloomberg

Thatcher and Hollywood - 1/16/12

In the days of the old Hollywood Code, female characters were inevitably punished if they strayed from traditional sexual mores. Today, female characters (and many men as well) must suffer if they violate a different, unwritten code. This new code declares that one’s worth depends on personal relationships, not public actions, and that sacrificing family time for the sake of achievement is nothing but short-sighted... More

Lawrence Kudlow, Investors Business Daily

Wanted: Bainful Turnaround - 1/16/12

There's a very troubled company out there called U.S. Government Inc. It's teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. And it badly needs to be taken over and turned around.

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Nicole Gelinas, Washington Examiner

Dangerous Debt Games - 1/13/12

As the president prepares his State of the Union speech, he must worry that another regular Washington event will overshadow it: the vote to increase the national debt ceiling.

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Donald Boudreaux, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

Government Debt: Who Owes It? - 1/13/12

Until the 1930s, the classical economic understanding was that the burden of government debt is passed on to future generations and that the need to pay off this debt was a genuine burden to the economy as a whole. But in the 1930s, along came John Maynard Keynes' "revolution" in economic thought.



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Josh Barro, Forbes

Romney and Bain - 1/12/12

The question Romney should be asked is what policy implications arise from the economic shifts of the last few decades, driven (in small part) by private equity investors like Bain Capital. Does rising income inequality mean that fiscal policy should be more redistributive? Does a reduction in job security call for a stronger safety net? Do new workforce needs mean we need a shift in education and training policies?

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Arthur Brooks, FreeEnterprise.com

The Value of Free Enterprise - 1/12/12

It might seem that the best case for free enterprise is the material one. Free enterprise lets people make more money, buy more and nicer stuff, and have a greater degree of comfort. The freer our economy is, the more competitive the US economy is vis-à-vis the rest of the world.  But these aren’t our best arguments. There is another reason, a transcendent reason, for which free enterprise matters... More

Erik Wasson, The Hill

Walker Urges More Reform - 1/09/12

Embattled Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) said politicians should boldly pursue a budget-cutting agenda even if Tea Party enthusiasm and popular support fades away.

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Steven Greenhut, City Journal

California Crony Capitalism Rebuked - 1/09/12

The California Supreme Court handed down what the state’s urban redevelopment agencies (RDAs) and their supporters called a “worst of all worlds” ruling—first upholding a law that eliminates the agencies, then striking down a second law that would have allowed them to buy their way back into power.

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Scott Winship, National Journal

Bogeyman Economics - 1/09/12

The available data belie the notions that a growing degree of economic risk pervades American life and that our circumstances today are significantly more precarious than they were in the past. Even as we slog through what are likely to be years of lower-than-normal growth and higher-than-normal unemployment, most Americans will be only marginally worse off than they were in past downturns.

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Investors Business Daily

Canada's New Model - 1/06/12

Away from the low growth and high regulation of an America under Washington's thumb, our northern neighbor is economically strong. As 2011 ends, Canada has announced yet another tax cut — and will soar even more.

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Chicago Daily Herald

Reform Roar in R.I. - 1/06/12

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Could tiny Rhode Island serve as the proverbial mouse that roars? Will suburban Democrats, and all Illinois Democrats, hear that roar?

Liberal Democrats in tiny Rhode Island did something truly astonishing last November.

That state, too, has an unfunded pension liability. Theirs is $7 billion, one of the largest per capita in the nation. Illinois’... More

Nicole Gelinas, New York Post

NY: State of Denial - 1/05/12

Gov. Cuomo’s sophomore State of the State speech yesterday would have been breathtakingly cynical — if he’d given it 15 years ago. Coming in 2012, the speech was cynical and dated.

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Paul Howard, Investors Business Daily

Innovation, Not Cuts, Improves Health Care - 1/04/12

Few people in Washington seem to recognize  that we won't be able to address the spending problem in health care without addressing the innovation challenge.

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Heather Mac Donald, City Journal

Classical Music Economics - 1/03/12

In 1991, the Nestlé Corporation became the Salzburg Festival’s first-ever commercial sponsor. The Austrian press exploded in rage. This moneygrubbing interloper would defile the sacred space of Salzburg and dumb down the august classical-music and theater showcase, predicted high-minded media wise men.

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Edward Achorn, Providence Journal

Rhode Island's Economic Spiral - 1/03/12

The loss of educated middle-class citizens — such human capital is extremely valuable — and the continued erosion of the state's private sector is hastening Rhode Island’s decline, creating a nightmare landscape of bankruptcy (government and personal), further flight, falling housing values, foreclosures, despair, and swelling dependency with far less money to help those in need.

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Jim McTague, Barron's

Disaster Politics - 1/01/12

It's an amazing coincidence. In nearly every presidential election year since 1972, there was an increase in disaster declaration; the same holds for the year before the elections. In such situations, states with inadequate funds for snow removal or debris cleanups suddenly have a senior partner. The federal government swoops in and picks up most of the tab -- which is something like a Keynes-inspired economic stimulus ... More

Nick Tuszynski -, Washington Times

Competitive Tax Reform - 1/01/12

The complexity of the tax code encourages firms to focus more on how to manipulate the tax code than on how to enhance their core business strategies. If we want to change the actions of the corporations, the rules of the game must change as well.

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Clive Crook, Bloomberg

Look Past Taxes - 1/01/12

A new report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development shows that in the middle of the last decade -- i.e., after the Bush tax cuts were introduced -- the U.S. income tax was about as strongly redistributive as income taxes in Canada, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands and Sweden.

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