From UVA’s Miller Center, Brian Domitrovic responds to Paul Krugman’s defense of the economic recovery.
Zerohedge highlights a James Grant interview on the Fed and the stock market. At NRO, Larry Kudlow argues Mitt Romney needs to widen his lead with the investor class. On The Kudlow Report, US Rep. Jeb Henserling (TX) debates tax policy:
TGSN recounts the history of William Jennings Bryan’s Cross of Gold. In The WSJ, Arthur Brooks suggests that generous social welfare programs demoralize workers.
From First Trust, Brian Wesbury predicts resurgent socialism in Europe will be short-lived.
Zerohedge features David Stockman discussing the Fed, debt and markets.
At Forbes, Jerry Bowyer explains how the economy is supposed to work.
In The Weekly Standard, Jeff Bell argues the President’s embrace of gay marriage will make it harder for him to win key swing states. At The American, James Pethokoukis applauds Arthur Brooks’ new book, The Road to Freedom. From Alhambra Partners, John Chapman analyzes Facebook’s economic impact.
RCP features Rick Perry continuing to critique the Fed.
Politico notes former Bush Administration officials critiquing Perry.
At Yahoo Finance, David Stockman endorses Rick Perry’s Federal Reserve criticism:
Reuters reports Michelle Bachmann joining the anti-Bernanke fray.
At Forbes, Richard Salsman provides an interesting history of the gold standard.
On First Trust, Brian Wesbury and Robert Stein suggest inflation is rising.
From The Kudlow Report, Brian Wesbury and Don Luskin debate inflation:
On RT America, Lew Rockwell discusses the Nixon Shock.
From 1971, Alan Reynolds blasts Nixon's price controls.
CNBC’s Squawk Box Europe features a good discussion of the gold standard:
The WSJresponds to Warren Buffett’s tax increase advocacy.
In The Washington Post, Jennifer Rubin reports Bill Bennett supports US Rep. Paul Ryan (WI) running for president.
The WSJnotes the decline of wealthy tax filers following last year’s soak-the-rich tax hikes in Maryland:
One year later, nobody's grinning. One-third of the millionaires have disappeared from Maryland tax rolls. In 2008 roughly 3,000 million-dollar income tax returns were filed by the end of April. This year there were 2,000, which the state comptroller's office concedes is a "substantial decline." On those missing returns, the government collects 6.25% of nothing. Instead of the state coffers gaining the extra $106 million the politicians predicted, millionaires paid $100 million less in taxes than they did last year -- even at higher rates.
From 1979, Ronald Reagan announces his campaign for president (h/t: James Pethokoukis):
At Forbes, Ralph Benko suggests Fed policy is keeping unemployment high (with a kind mention of this blog).
From The WSJ, Stanford’s Daniel Kessler explains that Obamacare imposes substantial penalties on working.
Cato’s Dan Mitchell sides with Grover Norquist against Sen. Tom Coburn (OK) on the need to cut taxes commensurate with eliminating tax expenditures.
On The Kudlow Report, Vince Reinhart discusses QE2’s end:
The NY Sunexplains to the President that his weak dollar, not speculators, is behind high oil prices.
At International Liberty, Dan Mitchell expresses cautious optimism at the President’s proposed corporate tax rate reduction.
From Mercatus, Veronique de Rugy and Jason Fichtner report federal income taxes paid by quintile: At The American Thinker, Chuck Roger rebuts Donald Trump’s protectionist rhetoric.
On Forbes, Brink Lindsey argues for innovation and growth.
From The NYT, David Stockman shows no appreciation for pro-growth economics, advocating painful tax increases on the middle class and wealthy, increased capital gains taxes, and means testing entitlements. On the plus side, he does favor a sound dollar:
The culprit here was the combination of ultralow rates of interest at the Federal Reserve and ultralow rates of taxation on capital gains. The former destroyed the nation’s capital markets, fueling huge growth in household and business debt, serial asset bubbles and endless leveraged speculation in equities, commodities, currencies and other assets. At the same time, the nearly untaxed windfall gains accrued to pure financial speculators, not the backyard inventors envisioned by the Republican-inspired capital-gains tax revolution of 1978. And they happened in an environment of essentially zero inflation, the opposite of the double-digit inflation that justified a lower tax rate on capital gains back then — but which is now simply an obsolete tax subsidy to the rich.
Also in The Times, Paul Krugman wants tax increases.
In The WSJ, Cato’s Alan Reynolds refutes the President’s tax-the-rich rhetoric:
It is not as though we have never tried high tax rates before. From 1951 to 1963, the lowest tax rate was 20% to 22% and the highest was 91% to 92%. The top capital gains tax rate approached 40% in 1976-77. Aside from cyclical swings, however, the ratio of individual income tax receipts to GDP has always remained about 8% of GDP.
The individual income tax brought in 7.8% of GDP from 1952 to 1979 when the top tax rate ranged from 70% to 92%, 8% of GDP from 1993 to 1996 when the top tax rate was 39.6%, and 8.1% from 1988 to 1990 when the highest individual income tax rate was 28%. Mr. Obama's hope that raising only the highest tax rates could keep individual tax receipts well above 9% of GDP has been repeatedly tested for more than six decades. It has always failed.
At NRO, Larry Kudlow wonders why the President has decided to move left on taxes.
The WSJexplains that raising taxes on the top two percent – even with a static analysis – wouldn’t fix the deficit.
On The Kudlow Report, U.S. Rep. Aaron Schock (IL) debates Robert Reich on the President’s tax hike proposal:
The new Laffer Center for Supply-Side Economics opens its doors with a report that finds tax code complexity costs 30% of the total income taxes collected.
From Forbes, Seth Lipsky wonders why Republicans aren’t talking about the falling dollar.
At MarketWatch, David Stockman lambasts the Federal Reserve.
In The Washington Post, George Will profiles Fed inflation hawk Tom Hoenig.
Also on Kudlow, David Goldman discusses inflation:
On Forbes, Louis Woodhill suggests Republicans should quit trying to create Social Security private accounts and focus on saving the existing program with stronger growth.
In an article printed in numerous alternative weeklies, former NYT reporter David Cay Johnston launches a lengthy assault on supply-side economics.
From Forbes, Nathan Lewis explains the principles that make the gold standard work.
At NRO, Larry Kudlow argues the dollar has been falling due to the Fed, not due to the government shutdown.
TGSN features a John D. Mueller speech in which he argues the dollar standard leads to monetary-related recessions, elevates the budget deficit, and enables permanent trade deficits:
At RCM, Louis Woodhill critiques Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget plan for providing lower growth than is required to recover from the recession.
From The Hoover Institution, Charles Wolf, Jr. explains why yuan revaluation is a bad idea.
The NYT profiles deficit hawk Peter Peterson, noting his early opposition to Reaganomics and his financing of bipartisan deficit advocacy:
Its most effective use of its founder’s fortune may be the millions of dollars in grants it has given over the years to think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the Center for American Progress, run by John Podesta, Mr. Clinton’s former chief of staff. “Everyone I know in the ‘budget community’ is trying to get Peterson money,” said Stan Collender, a longtime budget expert at the consulting firm Qorvis Communications.
At The Daily Beast, Reagan budget director (and former Peter Peterson associate) David Stockman advocates shutting down the government.
On NRO, Mona Charen reviews Richard Brookhiser’s new documentary on Alexander Hamilton.
At Future of Capitalism, Ira Stoll reports supply-siders are split on whether to emphasize fiscal or monetary policy.
From NRO, Larry Kudlow applauds Republican House leader Eric Cantor (VA) for rolling out a pro-growth agenda, but notes Cantor omitted the dollar from his proposal.
The Kudlow Report covers Portugal’s rejection of additional budget austerity:
At The American Spectator, Peter Ferrara worries about inflation.
On Gordon Liddy’s radio show, John Tamny discusses the dollar.
From TGSN, Ralph Benko recounts the dollar standard's three economic disorders (here, here and here).
In The WSJ, Stephen Moore reports on labor’s electoral maneuvers in Wisconsin.
On NRO radio, Douglas Irwin discusses his book on Smoot-Hawley but seems to miss Jude Wanniski’s point that the market meltdown began in 1929 due to expectation the legislation would pass.
At Minyanville, David Stockman rails against the Federal Reserve.
From 2009, Gabriel Fagan, James R. Lothian, and Paul D. McNelis find the gold standard era’s prosperity hard to beat.
From Forbes, Bret Swanson surveys the compelling opinions of University of Chicago economist John Cochrane.
AT TGSN, Ralph Benko recounts the dollar standard’s three political disorders (here, here and here).
On The Kudlow Report, Art Laffer discusses the producer price index’s surge:
At RCM, John Tamny advises Japan to avoid bad economics as it strives to recover.
In The Journal, James Grant reviews Douglas Irwin’s book on Smoot-Hawley.
From Bloomberg, Caroline Baum notes Bastiat’s counter to Keynesian ideas about government projects creating prosperity.
From Mises.org, David Stockman unleashes on the 2008 bailout and the dollar standard:
Viewed more broadly, the carnage on Wall Street in September 2008 was the inevitable crash of a 40-year financial bubble spawned by the Fed after Nixon closed the gold window in August 1971. As time passed, the Fed's market-rigging and money-printing actions had become increasingly destructive — leaving the banking system ever more unstable and populated with a growing bevy of Too Big to Fail institutions.
The 1984 rescue of Continental Illinois; the 1994 Mexican peso crisis bailouts; the Fed's 1998 life-support operation for LTCM — were all just steps along the way to the fall of 2008.
Then, faced with the collapse of their own handiwork, Washington panicked and joined the Fed in unleashing an indiscriminate bailout capitalism that has now thoroughly corrupted the halls of government, even as it has become a debilitating blight on the free market.
In The WSJ, Newt Gingrich and Peter Ferrara advocate making the Bush tax rates permanent.
At The Journal, Stephen Moore reports congressional conservatives are unsatisfied with the pace of spending cuts.
On the Peter Peterson funded Fiscal Times, James C. Cooper cites weak dollar advocate Fred Bergsten (of the Peterson Institute for International Economics) calling for dollar depreciation to boost exports. The irony is, the biggest barrier to US exports is the dollar standard Bergsten helped create in the 1970s.
At Mises.org, Frank Shostak argues economic growth doesn’t cause inflation.
On DNA India, Robert Mundell offers a must-read overview on the dollar, euro, yuan and gold.
Another must-read comes from Asia Times, where Hossein Askari and Noureddine Krichene provide a fascinating explanation of the global currency situation. (Hat tip: Ralph Benko.)
At RCM, Larry Kudlow wonders whether the administration’s new jobs czar, GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt, can convince the president to cut corporate taxes.
On The Kudlow Report, Don Luskin discusses roadblocks facing the economy:
Echoing Mundell, at Forbes Reuven Brenner argues for reform of corporate taxes.
Business Weekreports conservative Keynesian John Taylor is the House GOP’s leading advisor on Federal Reserve policy.
Mediaite posts video of this weekend’s Real Time with Bill Maher where Stephen Moore, Rachel Maddow and David Stockman debate Reaganomics:
On Bloomberg, Caroline Baum notes the U.S. is exporting inflation to China.
At The WSJ, Stephen Green analyzes the numerous challenges facing China’s economy.
In The NY Sun, Seth Lipsky calls Sen. Joe Lieberman (CT) a Kennedy liberal, though he notes Lieberman’s lack of focus on sound money.
AEI reports on historical budget consolidations that the U.S. can emulate.
In response to yesterday’s large Republican electoral gains, John Tamny argues for sound money as key to political success:
Despite the undeniable good that will result from the Tea Party movement hopefully forcing the political class to show spending discipline wrought by strict constitutional limits, there’s seemingly a big hole in the platform. Specifically, it’s hard to discern any interest in stabilizing the value of the dollar.
This is important, and it’s also a constitutional issue. Indeed, the Constitution empowers Congress “to coin money, regulate the value of”, and this line in the document if properly read says that Congress must legislate the issuance of dollars that hold a specific value today, tomorrow, and ten years from now.
In short, the Tea Parties, to be successful, must demand that the political class get serious about redefining the dollar in terms of gold. If not, all their spending, tax, pro-Constitution and anti-bailout protests won’t mean a whole lot, and the economy’s full recovery will remain a distant object.
The GOP needs a King Dollar policy, preferably one backed by gold. A depreciating dollar will drain cash from the U.S. and send it overseas; foreign investment into the U.S. will be stunted by a chronically weak dollar. And the inflationary consequences of the devaluing dollar will ultimately outweigh any low-tax-rate incentives.
As the dollar kept falling during the Bush years, it blunted the pro-growth effects of the 2003 tax cuts. There is a crucial lesson to be learned here: A strong and stable dollar is an essential complement to low tax rates.
Regarding Team Obama, it now appears that Tim Geithner’s protest that no country can devalue its way into prosperity was a lot of smoke-blowing. His credibility is going to suffer.
On The Kudlow Report, Stephen Moore analyzes the electoral results:
At CNBC, John Carney predicts Treasury Sec. Geithner is a goner.
On Bloomberg, supply-side guru Robert Mundell raises alarm bells that the falling dollar will create deflationary pressures in Europe:
In an earlier speech at a forum run by Bank of America- Merrill Lynch, Mundell, 78, said the Fed’s quantitative easing was “terrorizing” the world economy. In the interview, he drew parallels between a quantitative easing-induced dollar devaluation and the “inflation tax” of the 1970s, where depreciation caused by rising U.S. prices reduced the value of dollar holdings of governments and investors around the world.
“Dollars were depreciating in value, dollars were the major reserve, this was a tax on dollars held outside” the U.S., Mundell said.
On CNBC, David Stockman claims the U.S. Fed has destabilized the world economy and forces emerging markets to buy U.S. bonds:
At Politico, Cato’s David Boaz advocates Republicans focus on the economy, but makes no mention of the dollar.
On CNBC, Professor Mundell answers five questions about himself.
At RCM, John Tamny pens a devastating critique of Fed Chairman Bernanke.
In The WSJ, David Malpass explains how the weak dollar damages the economy.
In reality, workers are being reallocated, and by the millions. Due to the mortgage shambles, they are not moving around as much as in past recessions. But the structural reallocation is clearly pushing older workers into long-term unemployment.
Meanwhile, there's also been a powerful rechanneling of credit away from small businesses. Corporate and government jobs are faring better than small business jobs, another major structural change that Fed purchases will exacerbate by channeling cheap credit to big entities.
Jobs are moving to Asia as Washington's weak-dollar policy causes trillions of dollars to move abroad to protect against the risk of U.S. inflation and dollar debasement. Investors put their money into foreign factories, mines and workers, creating a boom there. They avoid long-term job-creating investments here, instead buying short-term IOUs from our government.
At The Kudlow Report, David Goldman discusses the weak dollar:
On Forbes, Brian Wesbury and Robert Stein warn against ignoring gold.
At Carpe Diem, Mark J. Perry notes the dollar’s ten-year forex decline: In Fortune, Nin-Hai Tseng suggests even if the lower dollar increases exports, it won’t heal the economy.
At Alhambra Investments, Joseph Y. Calhoun explains that dollar decline sends investment capital offshore. The WSJ's Pepper...and Salt comments:
On MarketWatch, David Stockman outlines gold’s former role in restraining debt.
