Economics

When budgets are allocated for projects, employees have a tendency to work around that number, rendering it all but impossible that the projects could cost less

As a result of the defeat in World War I, Germany had to pay reparations in gold or foreign currency, in annual installments of 2 billion goldmarks plus 26 percent of the value of Germany’s exports.

Photo by Keoni Cabral 1. Rental Real Estate Rental real estate is the classic way to have your money work for you. You may choose either to make a down payment on a property and have your tenants pay the mortgage, or pay for it in full so that you own it outright, which can…

Economics. Typical reactions range from blank stares to annoyed grumbles. It never has been sexy or hip, even if sexy or hip wouldn’t really exist without it. Since Fan Li wrote the “Golden Rules for Business” in 517 BC, people have been studying, writing about, and arguing economics nearly continuously. All of this studying,writing, and…

Photo by woodleywonderworks 1. Government Spending Ended the Great Depression A commonly held belief is that government spending stimulated the economy and eventually ended the Great Depression. Reality is excessive government spending took badly needed resources from the private sector and spent them on insolvable government programs and jobs that produced no real values. The…

Outsourcing — sending manufacturing or services work abroad where it can be done more cheaply — can be a tough sell in the best of times. It’s even more of a challenge when jobs in the U.S. are already hard to find, making it painful to think of precious jobs being shipped overseas. If only…

Given the actions of the Federal Reserve, particularly over the last twenty years or so, we have become accustomed to the fixing of interest rates as normal. Indeed, there appear to be benefits for many from such policies, at least in the near term. After all, given mortgage rates as low as 2% to 3%,…

Photo by US Mission to the United Nations Agencies in Rome 1. The free market reduces poverty A 2013 study published by the World Bank which examined 18 countries over four decades, found that 75% of the income gains accruing to the bottom 40% of income earners were a result of economic growth. Thus, policies…

Photo by kenteegardin 1. Higher taxes help the poor High taxes do not help the poor; economic growth does. When the taxes go up, those costs are usually just passed on to other people or spending is restricted. Either way, the net effect is often a huge hit on the economy. Millions of small and…

Almost forty years ago the economist Friedrich Hayek wrote a book entitled Denationalisation of Money-The Argument Refined: An Analysis of the Theory and Practice of Concurrent Currencies. Its thesis was that money and monetary order would be better provided by the private sector; instead of a central bank issuing a national currency, Hayek advocated a…

Many people will be shocked by these facts about world poverty…. Photo by Bob Jagendorf 1. World poverty has been cut in half In the past twenty years the world’s acute poverty rate has been slashed in half! Measuring poverty is based on daily consumption, not income. In 1990, 43% of the world lived in…

Regulatory Capture is a  process by which regulatory agencies become dominated and directed by the corporations or special interests they are supposed to be regulating. It’s like putting the mafia in charge of writing regulations for bookmaking. Most generally associated with Nobel laureate George Stigler and postulated as an actual theory in the early 1970’s,…