Category Archives: Economy
Scrap Stimulus
Demand is up for used cars because people are poorer. Supply is down because last year’s Cash for Clunkers program turned used cars into scrap. The scrapped used car market was, according to George Will, “an important mechanism for redistributing wealth to low income persons”. In the Boston Globe, Jeff Jacoby sums up the program as, “a deplorable exercise in budgetary wastefulness, asset destruction, environmental irrelevance, and economic idiocy”.
Never Mind
Fidel Castro on 50 years of the Cuban Collective – Never Mind! It may work for Michael Moore, but Castro offhandedly commented, “The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore”. Here’s Jeffry Goldberg’s Lunch with Fidel in “The Atlantic”.
Oops. Here’s an update. Fidel now says, “when I say the Cuban model doesn’t work for us anymore I mean that the capitalist model doesn’t work for the U.S. anymore”. Never Mind.
Not All Gloom and Doom
Illegal immigration has dropped 67% over the past 10 years . Meanwhile, unemployment notched up to a rate of 9.6% for August. In an unrelated move, chief economic adviser, Christina Romer, gave her farewell address at the National Press Club. According to Dana Milbank, she explained that economists don’t know why the economy stinks.
