Cartoon: College Texbook Costs

Paying No (Federal Income) Taxes

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Google Facts and Info

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Cartoon: Health Care Reform

Carlos Slim: THe World's Richest Man

Forbes magazine released its annual list of the world's richest people Wednesday, and for only the second time since 1995, Microsoft founder Bill Gates' name was not at the top.

This year, the title of "World's Richest" went to Mexican telecom mogul Carlos Slim, with a net worth of $53.5 billion.

Slim, whose holding company America Movil contains a sprawling collection of telecom assets, is the first non-American to be declared Forbes' richest person since 1994, when Japanese real estate kingpin Yoshiaki Tsutsumi held that honor. (He has since disappeared from the list entirely).

But Slim's financial edge over Gates is, well, slim, at least by billionaire standards -- just $500 million. A $1 increase in Microsoft shares, the compilers of the Forbes list noted at a press conference Wednesday, could send Gates' net worth ahead of Slim's.

Also, were it not for his extensive philanthropy, Gates would have a net worth in the ballpark of $80 billion, Forbes' Matthew Miller estimated.

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Cartoon: Insurance

43% Have Less Than 10K for Retirement

The percentage of American workers with virtually no retirement savings grew for the third straight year, according to a survey released Tuesday.

The percentage of workers who said they have less than $10,000 in savings grew to 43% in 2010, from 39% in 2009, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute's annual Retirement Confidence Survey. That excludes the value of primary homes and defined-benefit pension plans.

Workers who said they had less than $1,000 jumped to 27%, from 20% in 2009.

Confidence in ability to save enough for a comfortable retirement hovered at 16% of respondents, the second lowest point in the 20-year history of the survey.

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Loan Resets by Type

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Unemployment by Duration

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Deficit Projections

Greg Mankiw writes:
Making matters worse, these bleak budget projections are based on relatively optimistic economic assumptions. The administration forecasts economic growth of 3.0 percent from the fourth quarter of 2009 to the fourth quarter of 2010, followed by 4.3 percent the next year. By contrast, the Congressional Budget Office predicts growth of 2.1 percent and 2.4 percent for these two years. Lower growth would mean less tax revenue, larger budget deficits and a more rapidly increasing debt-to-G.D.P. ratio.

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If the President’s proposals were enacted, the federal government would record deficits of $1.5 trillion in 2010 and $1.3 trillion in 2011. Those deficits would amount to 10.3 percent and 8.9 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), respectively. By comparison, the deficit in 2009 totaled 9.9 percent of GDP.

Measured relative to the size of the economy, the deficit under the President’s proposals would fall to about 4 percent of GDP by 2014 but would rise steadily thereafter. Compared with CBO’s baseline projections, deficits under the proposals would be about 2 percentage points of GDP higher in fiscal years 2011 and 2012, 1.3 percentage points greater in 2013, and above baseline levels by growing amounts thereafter. By 2020, the deficit would reach 5.6 percent of GDP, compared with 3.0 percent under CBO’s baseline projections.

CBO Estimates

2009: 1.413 trillion

2010 CBO baseline: $1360 billion
2010 CBO (Obama): $1500 billion

2011 CBO baseline: $995 billion
2011 CBO (Obama): $1341 billion

2012 CBO baseline: $641 billion
2012 CBO (Obama): $915 billion

Unemployment: U3 v U6

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Cartoon: Government 101

“What were they thinking?”

Or more accurately, “What? Were they thinking?”

Cartoon: Counterfeiting

Feburary Unemployment 9.7%

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Annotated "Fear the Boom and Bust"

See and read it here.

Jim Bunning , Welfare, and Atlas

Everyone knows that federal spending is out of control. The feds are spending $1.4 trillion more than what they’re collecting in taxes. And that’s just for this year...

So, Bunning blocks a welfare bill on the ground that the federal government shouldn’t be borrowing any more money. If it can’t afford to be providing the welfare, Bunning said, then it shouldn’t be spending more money.

The statist crowd went ballistic. The attacks were the standard ones whenever anyone objects to any welfare-state scheme: “He’s selfish, self-centered, and greedy. He hates the poor and loves the rich. He’s just grandstanding. The bill is only a small percentage of total spending and so it doesn’t make any difference in the larger scheme of things.”

But the statist reaction to Bunning’s move goes much deeper than that and is a perfect reflection of what the socialistic welfare state has done to the American people. Having been born and raised under the welfare state, American recipients of welfare largess, including those on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment, education grants, mortgage guarantees, and bailout and stimulus monies, honestly believe that they are entitled to continue receiving it for as long as they “need” the money...

This is what the welfare state has done to America. It has produced a real war among the American people — between those who produce and own their wealth and those who are trying to get their hands on other people’s money through the force of the state. The 19th-century French legislator Frederic Bastiat put it well when he indicated that under the welfare state, the government becomes a great fiction by which some people try to live at the expense of other people.

read the essay

Capitalism v The Free Market

Economic Liberty Lecture Series: Sheldon Richman from The Future of Freedom Foundation on Vimeo.

Bryan Caplan responds:

If Sheldon were merely saying that libertarians' noun of choice should be "the free market," rather than "capitalism," he'd have a decent case. But for libertarians to reject "capitalism" as an alternate noun is overly defensive - and to announce that we "oppose capitalism" is completely confusing.

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Stephan Kinsella responds:

I have myself for years now preferred the term anarcho-libertarian instead of anarcho-capitalist, mostly because libertarianism is about more than just free markets. But to the extent capitalism means the private ownership of the means of production–and I think this is a defensible meaning still–it is of course libertarian. We can expect any advanced libertarian society to be “capitalist” in that it would have an industrial, productive economy where the means of production is privately owned, characterized by the division and specialization of labor.

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Happy Birthday, Murray

Today — March 2nd — is Murray Rothbard’s birthday. Had he lived, he’d be 84 years old today. And there’s sadness in that, because 84 in the world of today, though still a “ripe old age,” is not really all that old. Lots of people live to be 84. Even libertarians do it. Both Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek lived to be 92. Milton Friedman lived to be 94. Henry Hazlitt lived to be 98. In Radicals for Capitalism, his important 2007 book about the history of the modern American libertarian movement, Brian Doherty centers his story around what he describes as “[f]ive thinkers … without whom there would have been no uniquely libertarian ideas or libertarian institutions of any popularity or impact in America in the second half of the twentieth century … Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich A. Hayek, Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, and Milton Friedman.”

“Four men and one woman,” Doherty writes, “four Jews and one Catholic; four economists and one novelist; four minarchists … and one anarchist … two native-born Americans and three immigrants; two Nobel Prize winners and three who remained not only aloof from most professional and intellectual accolades but generated a heated hostility from cultural gatekeepers.” Doherty makes no mention of it, but there’s yet another facile point of comparison he might have used in discussing his five major figures — their longevity. For of his five major figures, three (Mises, Hayek, and Friedman) lived into their 90s. The other two — Rand and Rothbard — never made it to 80. Rothbard never made it to 70. It’s almost as though radicalism makes you die young. Mises, Hayek, and Friedman were minarchists — classical liberals, to be more precise.

Rand was a minarchist, too, but of a more radical stripe. She required that her limited, night-watchman State get along without any power of taxation, which she rightly regarded as theft. And Rothbard, who lived the shortest life of them all, was, of course, an anarchist, the only writer among them with the courage to assert boldly that the State didn’t need limiting, it needed abolishing.

Another way of putting this would be to say that Rothbard was the only pure libertarian among Doherty’s Big Five — not a classical liberal or even a more radical minarchist like Ayn Rand, but a thinker who saw the implications of the libertarian axiom, the nonaggression axiom, and unflinchingly accepted those implications, the only one among Doherty’s Big Five who was unafraid to follow his thinking where it must inevitably lead him. Brian Doherty calls Rothbard “the most uniquely and characteristically libertarian of libertarians; the one whose influence explains most about what makes the ideas, behavior, and general flavor of American libertarianism unique; the most illustrative and paradigmatic of the foundational figures of modern libertarianism.” It’s not for nothing that during the 1970s Rothbard came to be widely known as “Mr. Libertarian.”

listen (23:26)

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If Murray Rothbard—free-market economist, anarchist philosopher, American historian, and inveterate activist—had never lived, the modern libertarian movement would have nowhere near its current size and influence. He inspired and educated generations of influential intellectuals and activists, from Leonard Liggio to Roy Childs to Randy Barnett. He helped form and/or shape the mission of such institutions as the Institute for Humane Studies, the Cato Institute, the Libertarian Party, and the Ludwig von Mises Institute (and wrote a regular column for Reason for more than a decade). His initially unique combination of a Randian/Aristotelian natural rights ethic, Austrian economics, anarcho-capitalism, fervent opposition to war, and a populist distrust of “power elites” both public and private have injected modern libertarianism with a distinct flavor distinguishing it from other brands of pro-market thought. It was a differentiation intensified by Rothbard’s bombthrowing polemical style.

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Cartoon: Good Thing He Ain't Talking to Me

4th Quarter GDP: 5.9%

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Jobless Claims Increase

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Defaced Money

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Restaurant Performance Index

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Cartoon: Subprime

Cartoon: Unemployment

Cartoon: Unemployed

Cartoon: Toyotas and Social Security

Cartoon: General Tso's Chicken

Iron Man 2 Trailer

Tony Stark to Congress:

"You want my property, you can't have it."

"I have successfully privatized world peace."

Bank Failure Map

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Cartoon: All About Blame

Cartoon: Economic Theory v. Reality

Cartoon: Military Budget and Recessions

Cartoon: A Scarcity Free World

Top 400 Taxpayers

the top 400 individual income taxpayers in 2007 (out of 143 million taxpayers) earned 1.59% of all Adjusted Gross Income in that year, and paid 2.05% of all individual income taxes collected.

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Bank Failures: 188 This Recession, 20 This Year

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Nevada Casinos Lose $6.7 Billion

The state Gaming Control Board today released its “Gaming Abstract” for fiscal year 2009, which ended June 30, showing a net loss of $6.7 billion among the 260 major casinos in Nevada.

Clubs along the Las Vegas Strip, which makes up 53 percent of the gambling revenue in Nevada, registered a $4.1 billion loss.
...

The only other time Nevada gaming companies reported a loss was in 2003, of $33.5 million, said Frank Streshley, chief of tax and licensing for the board.

Total revenues were down from $25.0 billion in fiscal 2008 to $22.0 billion in fiscal 2009. Gambling was off 12.7%, room revenue off 16.6% (hotels are getting crushed everywhere), but beverage sales were flat!

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National Debt

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Cartoon: National Debt

Cartoon: Taxes

Interactive Umemployment Map

click here

John A. Allison on the current monetary system, debt, the Federal Reserve

see the entire interview

Dow 10,000

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Unemployed over 6 Months

According to the BLS, there are a record 6.31 million workers who have been unemployed for more than 26 weeks (and still want a job). This is a record 4.1% of the civilian workforce. (note: records started in 1948).

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Losing Unemployment Benefits

Of the almost 1.2 million workers facing a cut off of benefits in March alone:

380,000 workers will exhaust their 26 weeks of state benefits without accessing the temporary EUC extension program or the permanent federal program of Extended Benefits.

Another 814,000 workers will not be eligible to continue receiving EUC past their current tier of benefits.

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New York Strip: 1.58 Pounds

Bubbles Greenspan and the Significance of Dow 10,000

When the Dow scaled 10,000 in March of 1999, the stock market had been rallying for several years already. Just five years earlier, the Dow had breezed through the 5,000-level. Therefore, almost no one doubted that 10,000 would be a mere stepping stone to 15,000…or 20,000…or yes, even 36,000, as James Glassman and Kevin Hassett infamously predicted in their 1999 classic: Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting From the Coming Rise in the Stock Market...

What went wrong?

The short answer is: Alan Greenspan. (The long answer is also Alan Greenspan). The former Chairman of the Federal Reserve nurtured an epic financial bubble during most of his 19-year reign...

What does this condensed and biased portrayal of history have to do with Dow 10,000? Just this: without easy credit, and the mania it spawned, Dow 10,000 would not have been possible. When the Dow first reached that magical level in 1999, the blue chip index was trading hands for about 28 times earnings – its highest valuation in 70 years.

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Bill Bonner on Det and Defaulting

Moody’s warned that the US would lose its triple-A rating if it continues borrowing money at the present rate. Our old friend Marc Faber was on TV this week explaining what the consequences would ultimately be: the US will default on its debt, he said.

Mr. Geithner did not even bother with the idea of default. It was beyond his imaginative powers. As to losing the three As, he said that would “never” happen. Which is what set us to thinking about the quality of US leadership. Of course, the US will lose its bond rating…and will default. There is no question about it. No nation has ever existed, except for present company…whose histories have yet to be completed…that didn’t default, renege, collapse, go bankrupt, disappear, disintegrate, capitulate, or otherwise fall over and die. The only questions are when and how.

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Bill Bonner on Ben Bernanke

Mr. Bernanke is a standout example. The former head of the Princeton University economics department knows all there is to know about a depression – except the important part. He doesn’t understand what causes them. And he completely misunderstands what the role of government should be in dealing with them. But we have already explained all this to you, dear reader, so we won’t repeat ourselves here…except to say that any truck driver and hair stylist knows you can’t spend your way out of debt. Mr. Bernanke doesn’t believe it. That’s the very definition of Boobus Americanus Economistica; he has educated himself out of his common sense.

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My thoughts: In case you missed the Mogambo Guru's rant on the Fed, it is easy money and credit that causes the unsustainable boom that inevitably leads to a bust. So this Greenspan/Bernanke recession can be blamed on the Greenspan's attempt to prevent a market correction when he took rates to 1.00% thus fueling massive amounts of malinvestments. He was successful in papering over a recession temporarily. He was also successful in guaranteeing that the next next recession would be much more severe. So does Bernanke learn? Yes, but it is the wrong lesson. When the economy starts to head south in late 2007, Bernanke starts lashing interest rates. He takes them down to between 0.00% and 0.25%. Instead of allowing a market correction that would have put the economy back on solid ground (like 1920-21), we are facing a double dip recession, double digit recession, and possibly a lost decade of economic growth.

Mogambo Guru on the Fed

“Do you think that the economy of the USA is getting better, staying the same, or getting worse? And if you think that it is getting better, then explain how in the hell that is even possible, ya moron, when the Federal Reserve, that loathsome piece of treacherous crap which caused all the housing problems by creating too much money and credit, and which caused the derivatives problem by creating too much money and credit, and which caused the cancerous growth of a stifling, suffocatingly expensive government by creating too much money and credit, and which caused interest rates to drop so impossibly low by creating too much money and credit, is still on the job! Still On The Freaking Job (OTFJ), creating too much money and credit, but in amounts that dwarf any of the previously insane increases in the money supply by the loathsome Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve 1987-2006, even though those relatively small, $10 billion per month increases in Fed Credit were responsible for all the umpteen trillions of dollars in phantom gains, all of which are the result of year after year of sizzling inflations in stocks, bonds, houses, derivatives and the size of government that all that the extra money bought and paid for!”

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Mogambo Guru on Keynesian Economics

the second-worst economic theory in history, which is the asinine neo-Keynesian econometric stupidity currently being swallowed whole by the vast majority of university halfwits, media halfwits, political halfwits and a host of voters that I variously describe as, for want of a better term because I am peculiar that way, “halfwits”; all of whom actually think that by electing government representatives who will always spend more than the government gets in revenue, by the simple, brain-dead expedient of creating more and more debt, all happily aided and abetted by the despicable Federal Reserve creating the money necessary to buy that much new debt, so that the government can spend this new money, for the childish, Pollyanna-expressed aim of equalizing everyone’s outcomes in everything; they can achieve A Perfect World (APW)! Hahahaha! Morons!

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World GDP

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Obama' Economic Forecast

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Trade Deficit: 40.2 Billion

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Dow 10,000

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Employment: Hirings, Layoffs, Openings

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Hollywood's Top Earners 2009

1. Michael Bay, producer-director ($125 million)
2. Steven Spielberg, producer-director ($85 million)
3. Roland Emmerich, producer-director ($70 million)
4. James Cameron, producer-director ($50 million)
5. Todd Phillips, director ($44 million)
6. Daniel Radcliffe, actor ($41 million)
7. Ben Stiller, actor ($40 million)
8. Tom Hanks, actor ($36 million)
9. J. J. Abrams, producer-director ($36 million)
10. Jerry Bruckheimer, producer ($35.5 million)
11. Tyler Perry, actor-director-producer ($32.5 million)
12. Adam Sandler, actor-producer ($31.5 million)
13. Denzel Washington, actor ($31 million)
14. Emma Watson, actor ($30 million)
15. Rupert Grint, actor ($30 million)
16. Owen Wilson, actor ($29 million)
17. Nicolas Cage, actor ($28 million)
18. Russell Crowe, actor ($28 million)
19. Cameron Diaz, actor ($27 million)
20. Brian Grazer, producer, and Ron Howard, director-producer ($25.5 million)
21. Johnny Depp, actor ($25 million)
22. Steve Carell, actor ($25 million)
23. Robert De Niro, actor ($24.5 million)
24. Sarah Jessica Parker, actor ($24 million)
25. Katherine Heigl, actor ($24 million)
26. Shawn Levy, director-producer ($23 million)
27. Oren Peli and Jason Blum, writer-director-producers ($22.5 million)
28. Robert Downey Jr., actor ($22 million)
29. George Clooney, actor ($22 million)
30. Matt Damon, actor ($22 million)
31. Reese Witherspoon, actor ($21 million)
32. Angelina Jolie, actor ($21 million)
33. Jennifer Aniston, actor ($20 million)
34. Sandra Bullock, actor ($20 million)
35. Robert Pattinson, actor ($18 million)
36. Clint Eastwood, actor-director-producer ($17 million)
37. Kristen Stewart, actor ($16 million)
38. Mark Wahlberg, actor ($16 million)
39. Shia LaBeouf, actor ($15 million)
40. Brad Pitt, actor ($13.5 million)

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Recovery?

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Obama's 2010 v 2011 Budget

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Cartoon: Investing