ROMNEY: “I support the subsidy of ethanol,” he told an Iowa voter. “I believe ethanol is an important part of our energy solution for this country.”
PAWLENTY: the federal government’s subsidies of ethanol were bad policy that we can no longer afford.
Consider two examples. Suppose American entrepreneurs create many products that foreigners want to buy, and start many companies they want to invest in. That will increase the demand for dollars and so cause the dollar’s price to rise. Such innovation will also make Americans want to buy more goods and assets in the United States — and fewer abroad. The supply of dollars to the foreign exchange market will fall, further strengthening the dollar. This example describes very well the conditions of the late 1990s — when the dollar was indeed strong.
Now suppose the United States runs a large budget deficit that causes domestic interest rates to rise. Higher American interest rates make both foreigners and Americans want to buy more American bonds and fewer foreign bonds. Thus the demand for dollars increases and the supply decreases. The price of the dollar will again rise.
This example describes conditions in the early 1980s, when President Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts and military buildup led to large deficits. Those deficits, along with the anti-inflationary policies of the Fed, where Paul A. Volcker was then the chairman, led to high American interest rates. The dollar was very strong in this period.
"People don't realize the risk we're taking by taking care of these patients," the newspaper quoted Dr. Albert Triana of South Miami as saying. "There's more risk of something going wrong and more risk of getting sued. Everything is more complicated with an obese patient in GYN surgeries and in [pregnancies]," he told the newspaper.
It is not illegal for doctors to refuse overweight patients, but it has medical ethicists worried. So far, the weight cutoffs have been enacted only by South Florida ob-gyns, who have long complained about high numbers of lawsuits after difficult births and high rates for medical-malpractice insurance.
As an unaccountable bureaucracy with a single head, the bureau will be susceptible to bureaucracy’s worst pathologies: a tunnel-vision focus on the agency’s regulatory mission, undue risk aversion and agency overreach. While a more coherent consumer-protection regime is needed, consumer-protection goals often can conflict with other goals, such as promoting competition, lower prices and expanded choice for consumers; and ensuring safety and soundness.
“Vacancy rates are going up because owners have decided to take their units off the market,” said Ross Mirkarimi, a progressive member of the Board of Supervisors. He attributes that response to “peaking frustrations in dealing with the range of laws that protect tenants in San Francisco that make it difficult for small property owners to thrive.”
California’s redevelopment agencies got their start in 1945, ... as a way to jump-start development in impoverished inner cities. Today, many urbanists recall these projects as a national travesty, a failed experiment in top-heavy government and liberal social engineering that obliterated neighborhoods, eroded property rights, gave developers downtown land on the cheap, uprooted city dwellers, and exacerbated urban problems.
diverting billions of dollars from traditional services, such as schools, parks, and firefighting; use eminent domain to seize property for favored developers; and run up California’s debt to pay those developers to construct projects of dubious public value, such as stadiums and big-box stores.
Free is a risky price because it allows people to get something without really thinking about whether they want it. That’s why health insurers insist you pay at least $5 to see your doc or get a prescription. And it’s why DC’s nickel bag tax has been so effective in cutting use of plastic bags.
James also posits a way to reform prisons, which he dubs “violentocracies.” His proposal: smaller facilities that house no more than 24 inmates and are part of a larger, incentives-based system. At a Level 1 prison, for example, you get a lawyer, a Bible, and around-the-clock supervision; at Level 5, a cat and a coffee machine. At Level 10, you can earn a living and come and go with relative ease. The idea, James says, is not only to reduce the paranoia-fueled violence in large prisons but to encourage prisoners to work their way up the ladder.
According to Nelson, 18 institutions have adopted differential tuition based on academic programs in the past three years. Nelson, then a financial officer for the Oregon University System, studied the issue while earning his doctorate from UNL in 2008.
Business and engineering are the two programs most frequently subject to higher tuition rates, Nelson found. On average, the 2008 study found that business students pay 14 percent more tuition at colleges that have adopted differential tuition policies; engineering students pay 15 percent more.
America has a smaller fraction of prime-age men in work and in the labour force than any other G7 economy. Some 25% of men aged 25-54 with no college degree, 35% of high-school dropouts and almost 70% of black high-school dropouts are not working (see article).
Beyond the toll to individuals, the lack of work among less-skilled men could have huge fiscal and social consequences. The cost of disability payments is some $120 billion (almost 1% of GDP) and rising fast. Male worklessness has been linked with lower marriage rates and weakening family bonds.
It was very, very bad. The tornado cut all the way across town. Many communities were devastated and many businesses destroyed. The town will recover, but there is a great deal of rebuilding to do.
Living out of town may feel green, but it isn’t. Americans live too far apart, drive too much and walk too little. The tax- deductibility of mortgage interest encourages people to buy houses rather than rent flats, buy bigger properties rather than smaller ones and therefore to spread out. Minimum plot sizes keep folk out of, say, Marin County, California. He sees it as an indictment of planning that spreading Houston has “done a better job of providing affordable housing than all of the progressive reformers on America’s East and West coasts.” Mr Glaeser hopes, for the planet’s sake, that China and India choose density over sprawl and public transit over the car. If his own country set a better example, there might be more chance of persuading them.
