News
Lifestyle costs up from previous generations
Do younger generations have a higher economic baseline for a minimum lifestyle than previous generations?
Opinion
Money Can’t Buy Teachers’ Love
Lawmakers would be wise to stick to the facts, ignore the noise, develop budgets that make incremental improvements to compensation, and advance policies that ensure North Carolina classrooms are great places for public school teachers.
Opinion
Backward glances—the Command or Competition question
In today's anxious financial environment, when we look to the government and the Federal Reserve to step into the economy with interest rate adjustments and extra cash reserves at every downturn, it's a little appreciated fact that there was an important pre-Federal Reserve banking era in the United States. Even today, that era has insights to offer into American monetary and banking policy, and U.S. economic health.
Opinion
Can’t Buy Me Love
When it comes to money and happiness, economists make two points. First, that more money or wealth leads to greater happiness (as a general rule). And second, that additional dollars are always used to satisfy additional but lower priority wants than previous dollars, everything else equal. If money can't buy you love, it can buy you happiness, at least indirectly.
Opinion
Government’s problem is its spending
When the funding source is “other people’s money,” frugality flies out the window.
Opinion
Making Cents of the Penny
"A penny for your thoughts," and "putting in your two cents worth" could lose some of their significance if the penny becomes extinct in the U.S., a possibility that has been considered in the past, and may be up for reconsideration now. The latest threat to the penny is an upward trend in the market price of the metals, particularly zinc, that it contains.
Opinion
Lindalyn’s Journal
Hang on to your wallets, it's budget time. In Washington, Raleigh, and town halls everywhere, government officials are busy compiling their wish lists (funded by us, the taxpayers). Expect K-12 funding, a perennial line item favorite, to continue increasing at a much higher rate than the cost of living.
Opinion
No. 130: Pieces of Eight: Monetary Policy and U.S. Constitution
Edwin Vieira, Jr.'s Pieces of Eight is an indispensable work for anyone who believes in upholding the U.S. Constitution.
News
Why the Econ-Pundits Got It Wrong
RALEIGH — Well-publicized forecasts of the catastrophic American deflation of 2002, trumpeted by such headlines as “The Deflation Monster Lives” and “Why We Should Fear Deflation,” never materialized, a Pace University economist said at a John Locke Foundation luncheon Friday. Austrian-school economist Joseph T. Salerno refuted the many myths about deflation, including its definition, differing causes, and effects upon the American economy.
