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How High Prison Costs Slash Education and Hurt the Economy
Tweet Share on Facebook May 24, 2012 CommentDavid Brodwin is a cofounder and board member of American Sustainable Business Council. Follow him on Twitter at @davidbrodwin.
Michigan, like many states, suffers an education gap that threatens its growth. According to a state turnaround plan, 62 percent of jobs will require a post-secondary education by 2018. Sadly, less than 40 percent of today's workers qualify. Without more college graduates, the best-paying jobs will move away—or they will never be created in the first place.
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Congress Should Scrap the Debt Limit
Tweet Share on Facebook May 23, 2012 CommentChad Stone is chief economist at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Policymakers who want to improve the country's economic and budget outlook should scrap the debt limit (also known as the debt ceiling), which plays no role in enforcing budget discipline. Rather, in today's dysfunctional political environment, it encourages reckless brinksmanship that makes it harder to work out the compromises necessary to achieve a sustainable deficit-reduction deal.
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Hospitals Must Safeguard Patient Data
Tweet Share on Facebook May 22, 2012 CommentM. Eric Johnson is a professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College and director Tuck's Center for Digital Strategies. His book, The Economics of Financial and Medical Identity Theft, was published in March 2012.
Like the challenge of controlling U.S. healthcare costs, safeguarding patient information has proved elusive. Three years ago as part of the Obama administration's drive to digitize healthcare, the Department of Health and Human Services mandated public disclosure of breaches affecting 500 or more individuals. Those disclosures quietly clicked past 20 million patients this month. In each case, patients are notified, the breach is posted on Health and Human Services' wall of shame, and in some cases organizations are fined. But the real costs are born by patients in lost privacy and the lasting fear of fraud. Regardless of the breach size, patients experience harm. For example, last week Shatina Golden, a Northwestern Memorial employee, was charged with stealing patient identities which she used to pay her water and gas bill. A search of her home turned up personal information of more than 50 patients, credit card numbers, and social security numbers. Ms. Golden is just one tiny example of the information security problem faced in healthcare. Medical identities fuel crimes large and small. Earlier this month, federal officials charged over 100 healthcare professionals with the nearly half a billion dollars of Medicare fraud.
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Double Liability A Better Response to J.P. Morgan Mess
Tweet Share on Facebook May 22, 2012 CommentHester Peirce is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Prior to joining Mercatus, Peirce worked at the Securities and Exchange Commission and as senior counsel on the Senate Banking Committee.
Gasps about J.P. Morgan's more than $2 billion in trading losses dominated Washington conversation last week. J.P. Morgan, the government-anointed rescuer of its weaker brethren during the financial crisis, was not supposed to make a mistake like this. As people fret about the need for more regulation to keep big banks from losing money, it is worth asking whether regulating banks into profitability is really the answer.
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Merkel's 'Austerity,' Obama's 'Growth,' and the Power of Framing
Tweet Share on Facebook May 21, 2012 CommentJames Rickards is a hedge fund manager in New York City and the author of "Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis" from Portfolio/Penguin. @JamesGRickards
Economic analysis is difficult enough without politicians misleading the public through something called "framing." The idea is that if your give your policy a good label and give your opponent's policy a bad label, those labels will stick and affect the debate even if the actual policies are the opposite of what the label tries to convey. This process has been given a boost lately with the popularity of behavioral economics, which looks at framing in a scientific way. Yet, it's one of the oldest tricks in politics.
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China’s Scary Financial System
Tweet Share on Facebook May 21, 2012 CommentMr. Hahn is director of economics at the Smith School, University of Oxford and chief economist at the Legatum Institute. Mr. Passell is a senior fellow at the Milken Institute and the economics editor of the Legatum Institute's Democracy Lab. They are co-founders of Regulation2point0.org, a web portal on regulatory policy.
As China's economy slows, skepticism about the sustainability of the Chinese miracle is gaining traction. But the reasons offered for why Beijing's ducks may finally be coming home to roost are all over the place.
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Government Regulation Is Killing Economic Growth
Tweet Share on Facebook May 18, 2012 Comment (1)Robert Luddy is a member of the North Carolina Leadership Team for Job Creators Alliance and president and founder of CaptiveAire Systems, Inc.
The history of this nation is one of risk and reward. Our Founding Fathers took major risks to journey to an unknown land and launch an unprecedented experiment in human freedom and create the United States of America. Generations of patriots have risked everything in defense of this experiment. These roots of freedom have grown into the most dynamic economy in the history of the world.
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Congress Must Do More for Long-Term Unemployed
Tweet Share on Facebook May 16, 2012 Comment (5)Chad Stone is chief economist at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
The long-term unemployed are in deep trouble, with the human and economic costs of long-term unemployment reaching crisis proportions. That was the message of a piece in Sunday's New York Times from an incongruous pairing of economist policy wonks from opposite sides of the political divide. Policymakers should take heed.
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How to Prevent Another J.P. Morgan-Style Loss
Tweet Share on Facebook May 16, 2012 CommentDavid Brodwin is a cofounder and board member of American Sustainable Business Council. Follow him on Twitter at @davidbrodwin.
Last week's $2 billion trading loss at J.P. Morgan Chase dashes any hope that we've resolved the instability of our banking system. How can we get banks to trade responsibly? When "too big to fail" banks generate huge losses, we all suffer. Legitimate businesses can't get credit. Taxpayers foot the bill for bailouts. Working Americans get laid off as scarce credit hobbles the economy.
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How Barack Obama's Fed Policy Fuels the Oil Shock
Tweet Share on Facebook May 16, 2012 CommentJoseph Mason is the Moyse/LBA Chair of Banking at the Ourso School of Business at Louisiana State University and a senior fellow at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
The Federal Reserve met last month to discuss its economic outlook. And though the Fed didn't announce a formal third round of quantitative easing, Chairman Ben Bernanke confirmed the zero-bound interest rate policy will continue into the near future. What is interesting to note—and underreported—is the impact this will have on oil prices.
