Ralph Reiland
Here’s a headline last week: “Senate Republicans vote to block Paycheck Fairness Act.” The quick and incorrect interpretation of that headline, if casual readers don’t have the time or interest to dig into the facts? Republicans are against “fairness” in…
With Russian troops in Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula, here’s a look back at how Barack Obama and Mitt Romney sized up Russia and Vladimir Putin during the 2012 presidential campaign. First, here’s an excerpt of Romney’s interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer…
The Great Divide” series of articles on inequality in the New York Times offers a textbook example of exaggerating the size of the hole and ignoring the donut. In “We Are Not All in This Together,” for instance, sociology professor Shamus…
Across the board, public opinion in all three major political groups — Democrats, Republicans and independents — identified unemployment as the nation’s top problem in a recent Gallup poll, released on Feb. 17. The next day, ironically, an analysis by…
It’s the “defining challenge of our time,” declared President Obama, referring to income inequality in the American economy. A good start for Mr. Obama in reducing the hardships that exist in the poorer segments of this economy — an economy…
The big story that’s simultaneously being spotlighted from the Vatican to the White House, from Oxfam to newly elected Mayor Bill de Blasio in New York City, is economic inequality and the purportedly overly-skewed and unjust distribution of wealth. “The…
Today is our lucky day, the day each year my wife and I get to be on the receiving end of multiple doses of federal welfare — gratis money we didn’t ask for and don’t need that will be picked…
So we didn’t go over the fiscal cliff and instead got a deal that delivers no cuts in government spending, raises taxes on “the rich” (the definition of which consistently changes), expands the size and role of government, keeps the…
“If there is any lesson in the history of ideas, it is that good intentions tell you nothing about the actual consequences,” stated Thomas Sowell, economist at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. Similarly, Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman warned of…
“Why so much fighting about economics?” asked a friend recently. “Economics is just logic.” Well, not exactly. The basics are logical, as in reasonable or to be expected. But things get very tricky and political when it comes to applications….
