Government Wages: Too Extravagant? »
(Geoffrey Lawrence/NPRI) – It’s one of the most challenging questions facing labor economists today: At what level should most public employees be paid? In public-sector employment, the typical price signals that help determine wage rates in competitive labor markets are absent. After all, most government agencies do not compete in an open labor market wherein they must also provide quality goods to discerning customers at competitive prices. Instead, they operate legal territorial monopolies for the [...]
White House Content With 9% Unemployment »
(Geoffrey Lawrence/NPRI) – New projections from the White House’s Office of Management and Budget last week predict that the national unemployment rate will remain around 9 percent throughout the next 16 months and will not again approach 6 percent until 2016. Those numbers now approximate what the Congressional Budget Office has said. Yet, even those numbers are rosy compared to what Wall Street analysts have forecast. This stormy vision of the future is being laid [...]
Why Unemployment Persists: Part IV »
(Geoffrey Lawrence/NPRI) – Since the dawn of democratic government, politicians’ favorite path to retaining and/or expanding their power has been to shower voters with promises of things to be delivered for “free.” President Lyndon Johnson won office with promises of a “Great Society,” wherein the elderly would have access to “free” or subsidized health care. President Obama promised to extend that benefit to everyone. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt went so far as to promise every [...]
Courtesy Of Obamacare, Education Will Suffer In Nevada »
(Geoffrey Lawrence/NPRI) – Often lost in the debate over the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) — the sweeping health care “reform” legislation popularly known as ObamaCare — is the negative impact it will have on education, public safety and other public services as health insurance subsidies begin to consume a greater share of state spending. Congressional Democrats claimed, when passing PPACA, that the dramatic expansion of entitlements it entailed would actually lower the [...]
Why Unemployment Persists: Part III »
(Geoffrey Lawrence/NPRI) – The evidence is in: Washington’s economic nostrums are repeating the job-destroying errors of the 1930s. Parts one and two of this series showed the perverse impact artificial credit expansion has upon any society’s capital structure, with the resulting damage to employment: Artificial credit temporarily suppresses interest rates, deforming entrepreneurial investment in both quantity and quality, while stimulating the rise of unviable “bubble” industries. Short-lived inflationary booms are then followed by economic recession [...]
The Danger In Giving Public Servants Too Much Power »
(Geoffrey Lawrence/NPRI) – If ever there were a case study in the dangers of unionization for public employees, it is the case of firefighters in Southern Nevada. Week after week, firefighter issues adorn the news headlines. In the aftermath of revelations that the North Las Vegas Fire Department paid John Oceguera while he served as speaker of the Nevada Assembly, Fire Chief Al Gillespie admitted that the department’s staffing records are completely inaccurate for top [...]
Why Unemployment Persists: Part II »
(Geoffrey Lawrence/NPRI) – Nevada’s unemployed construction workers are experiencing firsthand the consequences of government-manipulated interest rates. As described in Part I of this series, their systemic unemployment stems from a misalignment between the economy’s capital structure and the actual structure of consumer preferences — a misalignment produced by artificial interest rates that misrepresent the state of the economy. Misled by those contrived rates, business people invest in riskier, higher orders of production that, for the [...]
Why Unemployment Persists: Part I »
(Geoffrey Lawrence/NPRI) – Pundits and policymakers are easily perplexed by economic recessions and their most visible manifestation, unemployed workers. To these commentators, it is mysterious that labor unemployment remains high across the nation despite massive federal deficit-spending policies, financial bailouts and monetary easing. Here in Nevada, the official unemployment rate has remained in double digits for 29 straight months. Befuddled, many prominent commentators grasp at straws to explain causes of the suffering. Some blame inadequate [...]
The Bridge To “Outer” Nowhere? »
(Geoffrey Lawrence/NPRI) – In his Washington Examiner column today, Cato’s Gene Healy calls the space program the “biggest bridge to nowhere.” In light of the space shuttle program’s cancellation, Healy points out that the average American enjoys little benefit from a federally-funded space program and that space exploration should be the domain of private enterprise. In fact, in a 2010 Rasmussen poll, the majority of Americans agreed with that statement. As Healy points out, defenders [...]
The $200 Million Dollar Question »
(Geoffrey Lawrence/NPRI) – The Nevada Supreme Court dealt a blow to Gov. Brian Sandoval’s budget proposal on May 26, leading him to abandon his opposition to tax hikes and support higher state payroll and sales taxes for the next two years. And the Court may not be done yet. With less than two weeks to go before adjournment of the 2011 Legislative Session, the Court delivered an opinion in Clean Water Coalition v. The M [...]
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