Daily Archives: August 3, 2012
Sugar-coating a bitter pill
It’s tax-free weekend. That means I’ll be headed to the department stores to supplement my wardrobe. Sure, I know that the tax-free weekend is a gimmick. It was established in 2001 as a sugar-coating of a bitter pill. That year, the General Assembly raised a significant amount of taxes to bridge a budget gap. ButContinue Reading
New at CJO: The U.S. unemployment rate rises as hiring increases
Unemployment up; what lessons can we learn?
Dan Mitchell of Cato Institute writes about that in this post. He rightly concludes that while the right direction to move if we want more employment and economic growth is toward freer markets, as in Hong Kong and Singapore. Alas, the big government zealots in the Obama regime are making us more like France.
Should we boycot the hateful Walmart and Amazon?
In the spirit of the attacks on Dan Cathy and Chick-fil-a I am wondering if those of us who disagree with Walmart and Amazon’s position on establishing an internet sales tax should declare these two corporate giants to be hate filled and call for a boycott. After all, clearly such a tax is regressive andContinue Reading
Markets are always regulated — the question is how
That is the point of Sheldon Richman’s Freeman column today. The alternative to regulation by government officials (that is, coercive mandates and prohibitions) is not no regulation at all, but regulation by consumers, competition and the neutral rules of the common law.
Charter schools outperform districts again
Once again, the average performance composite score of charter schools beat the district school average. The performance composite is the percentage of students’ scores in each school that were at or above grade level on state end-of-grade and end-of-course tests. Admittedly, I am not a fan of comparing average performance composites, but critics of charterContinue Reading
Heritage expert swats away misguided critiques of voter ID laws
Hans von Spakovsky, the Heritage Foundation expert who has spoken in favor of a voter identification law for North Carolina, uses a new National Review Online column to rebut claims about the alleged negative impacts of voter ID. Among the many poorly researched articles that have written about voter-ID laws, one piece that appeared recentlyContinue Reading
Cal Thomas compares the 44th and 42 presidents
Cal Thomas‘ latest column probes President Obama’s decision to rely on a Democratic predecessor to help rally the party at the upcoming Charlotte convention. The president’s problem is that he’s no Bill Clinton. Clinton was willing to compromise with congressional Republicans. Obama and congressional Democrats are not. Clinton signed the welfare reform bill after vetoingContinue Reading