Will the Pandemic Promote Political Power in Perpetuity?
James Bovard . “It’s like we created another industry in our state. The amount of money is staggering,” Andrew Schaufele, director of Maryland’s Bureau of Revenue Estimates, happily declared last week. The Biden stimulus plan is deluging governments across America with hundreds of billions of dollars of extra revenue that will allow politicians to stretch their power […]
New Single-Family Home Sales Decline in April
Robert Hughes Sales of new single-family homes fell in April, decreasing 5.9 percent to 863,000 at a seasonally-adjusted annual rate from a 917,000 pace in March. Sales are still up 48.3 percent from the year-ago level but have fallen in five of the last nine months (see top of first chart). Weakness over the last […]
The War on Retirement
James R. Harrigan Antony Davies Of the five most expensive wars the United States has waged, only one – World War II – involved an armed enemy. The other five – poverty, drugs, terror, and Covid, were all wars on nouns. Now the federal government appears to have inadvertently stumbled into another war – the […]
What the Heck Is Bitcoin All About?
Aleksandra Przegalinska Peter C. Earle, senior fellow at AIER joins Aleksandra Przegalinska for a conversation on the unknowns of bitcoin, crypto currency and blockchain technologies in the modern era. Aleksandra Przegalinska Alexandra is an Associate Professor of management and obtained her PhD in the philosophy of artificial intelligence at the Institute of Philosophy of […]
Understanding Big Tech Dominance Requires Economics, Not Conspiracy Theories
Peter C. Earle “Censorship” is an arguably specious accusation to level at Big Tech and social media firms. The argument that such platforms are players in a grand, purposeful yet unseen world order, or that they are being ordered to pick winners and losers in the marketplace of ideas, are convenient, to be sure. But […]
Fears of Price Instability Pull Down Consumer Sentiment in Early May
Robert Hughes The preliminary results from the University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers show overall consumer sentiment fell in early May and remains well below pre-lockdown levels. Fears over rising prices were the primary cause. Overall consumer sentiment decreased to 82.8 in early May, down from 88.3 in April, a 6.2 percent decline (see […]
Everyday Prices Rise 6.1 Percent from a Year Ago
Robert Hughes The AIER Everyday Price Index increased by 0.6 percent in April, the fifth consecutive gain following back-to-back decreases in October and November. The most recent rise puts the 12-month gain at 6.1 percent, the fastest pace since September 2011. The positive contributors to the April rise were led by motor fuels […]
Focused Protection Would Have Been the Right Pandemic Response
Ethan Yang It should be safe to say that the United States is finally starting to move past Covid-19 as herd immunity nears closer and closer. The debate over whether lockdowns were a good pandemic response has been raging since day one with each side attempting to grasp at whatever immediate evidence is available. The […]
Competing With China Shouldn’t Entail Becoming More Like China
Ethan Yang President Joe Biden delivered a speech to a Joint Session of Congress on April 28, 2021 where he made the following remark that should be seen as a red flag: “America is moving — moving forward — but we can’t stop now. We’re in competition with China and other countries to win the 21st century. […]
Imperial College Predicted Catastrophe in Every Country on Earth. Then the Models Failed.
Phillip W. Magness . The satirist Ambrose Bierce once defined prophecy as the “art and practice of selling one’s credibility for future delivery.” Covid-19 has produced no shortage of doomsaying prophets whose prognostications completely failed at future delivery, and yet in the eyes of the scientific community their credibility remains peculiarly intact. No greater example […]
