About: Jon Sanders

In “How Keynes may have helped cause the Financial Crisis,” James Pethokoukis comments on research by Jeffrey Chwieroth and Andrew Walter on banking crises and draws a concerning lesson on the aftermath of Keynes: Voter expectations that government will “do something” to stabilize the macroeconomy have strengthened the incentive for government to bailout troubled financialContinue Reading

Do you remember when the media were apoplexed by reports that the Defense Department during the days of Reagan were spending hundreds, hundreds of dollars on porcelain throne lids? USA Today does, or did when former Defense Sec. Caspar Weinberger died. For those who don’t, yes, there have been times when media were offended byContinue Reading

The new poll by Civitas found “Voters soundly opposed to paying more for so-called Green Energy.” Earlier this year a poll by the NC Sustainable Energy Association found “North Carolinians overwhelmingly support the increased use of clean energy sources like solar or wind energy.” In my newsletter today, I show how those seemingly disparate pollContinue Reading

The Great Gatsby is a story set in Long Island. The state of New York offers production companies an even more aggressive array of film incentives than North Carolina, including a 30 percent, fully refundable tax credit. This is a no-brainer, right? “Gatsby” would obviously be filmed in its natural home. Well, it’s not soContinue Reading

Unlike the media True Believers, I cannot cheer a four-year low in unemployment that is far above the predicted level of unemployment if Congress hadn’t passed Obama’s failure of a “stimulus” in 2009 statistically helped by the fact that so many potential workers have abandoned the labor force — if the labor force participation rateContinue Reading

My latest newsletter examines the widely disparate job counts of studies of North Carolina’s film incentives. It basically boils down to one model that takes into account costs and benefits and one model that calculates only benefits. Beyond that, I look at other concerns over film incentives: there is no set winning level from yearContinue Reading

In response to your post, George, I’d like to pull up a comment of mine a while back: Socialists “spread the wealth” the way pickup trucks spread ‘possums. They never, ever understand the idea that wealth is dynamic, that it can be created or destroyed, and that freedom allows its creation, while redistributory statism leadsContinue Reading

Not to be outdone by solar, the film industry in North Carolina is performing a redoubtable Incentives Dance – and they’ve added a new twist on it by suggesting that the mere appearance of a bill to tweak the industry’s tax credits is already hurting business. Several recent news articles across the state have highlightedContinue Reading