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Fiscal Cliff Deal Was Bad for Small Businesses
Tweet Share on Facebook January 17, 2013 CommentRobert Luddy is the founder and president of CaptiveAire Systems, Inc., and a member of the Job Creators Alliance.
America would not be the economic powerhouse today without the innovation of Silicon Valley (largely and thankfully unregulated) and our growing small business entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs have created the technologies, by risking their own capital, which make our economy efficient and robust. Emerging entrepreneurs are world-class innovators.
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Dodd-Frank Qualified Mortgage Rules Will Create a New Bubble
Tweet Share on Facebook January 16, 2013 CommentJay Weiser is an Associate Professor of Law and Real Estate at Baruch College, and author of the upcoming Mercatus Center study "Qualified Mortgage Standards."
Father Edward Flanagan, the legendary founder of Boys Town, said, "There are no bad boys. There is only bad environment, bad training, bad example, bad thinking." Father Flanagan lives on in the Dodd-Frank Act's Qualified Mortgage provisions, which imagine a housing market where there are no bad borrowers, only bad laws and bad lenders who will cease sinning if the catechism (in the form of 804 pages of regulations) is long enough. Perversely, Qualified Mortgage protects lenders from liability for many high-risk loans, encourages riskier loan types, and continues to rely on federal agency guarantees. Dodd-Frank must be simplified to require borrower skin in the game.
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Start Cutting Government Spending With the Defense Budget
Tweet Share on Facebook January 16, 2013 CommentRyan Alexander is the president of Taxpayers for Common Sense.
As we look ahead to the many fiscal milestones Congress will face in the coming months, it is worth spending a few minutes thinking about the largest portion of our discretionary budget: defense. At more than $600 billion annually, national security takes up more than half of U.S. discretionary spending and outstrips the cost of all entitlement programs save Social Security. So as we think about how to reduce future deficits and make responsible decisions about reducing wasteful spending throughout government, the defense budget is a great place to start.
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Let the Firearm Industry Pay for the Cost of Gun Violence
Tweet Share on Facebook January 14, 2013 CommentDavid Brodwin is a cofounder and board member of American Sustainable Business Council. Follow him on Twitter at @davidbrodwin.
A cornerstone of capitalism is that no company gets a free ride. Each business or industry needs to charge enough to cover the full cost of its own operations. Those that can't cover their costs must (with rare exceptions) be allowed to fail. This basic law of capitalism needs to be applied to firearms.
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The U.S. Must Challenge China's Accounting Standards
Tweet Share on Facebook January 11, 2013 CommentRichard A. D’Aveni is Bakala Professor of Strategy at Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. Strategic Capitalism, his fifth book, was recently published. Professor D’Aveni is listed in the top 25 of the Thinkers 50, a global ranking of the top management thinkers in the world. See www.richarddaveni.com.
There is new hope that the important but problematic role accountants have played in translating the financial records of China's state capitalist system for the global economy may be corrected. Witness the Securities and Exchange Commission's move to charge five large accounting firms with securities violations for failing to turn over audit documents of U.S.-listed Chinese companies.
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4 Common Sense Ways Congress Should Deal With Our Finances
Tweet Share on Facebook January 8, 2013 CommentRyan Alexander is the president of Taxpayers for Common Sense.
Last week the 113th Congress was sworn in. While newly elected members of Congress are still finding their way around the House and Senate office buildings and hiring staff, they are expected to get right to work on the major fiscal challenges facing the country. Here's hoping they use common sense in addressing the problems we face with some clarity and humility we didn't see from the 112th Congress.
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10 Ways Dodd-Frank Will Hurt the Economy in 2013
Tweet Share on Facebook January 7, 2013 CommentHester Peirce is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center and served as a senior counsel on the minority staff of the Senate Banking Committee during the drafting of Dodd-Frank.
The fiscal cliff deal painfully hammered out in the waning hours of 2012 likely foreshadows the battles yet to come this year over the country's fundamental mismatch between revenue and spending. But these fiscal fights are not the only reason 2013 promises to be interesting. The new year will bring with it an intense period of Dodd-Frank rulemaking and the implementation of rules recently put in place.
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Why IT Should Be on the CEO's Agenda
Tweet Share on Facebook January 4, 2013 CommentThomas C. Lawton is a Visiting Professor of Business Administration at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth
There is growing evidence across industries of the tendency to elevate information technology, known as IT, from the operational to the strategic level. Awareness of IT's organizational importance, together with management fear that underinvestment in IT will result in loss of competitiveness, causes many companies to over-invest in IT without having a clear understanding and expectation as to the intended outcomes. However, lack of an explicit and tangible business case, business focus, and business-driven approach in IT investment decisions and implementation is one of the main reasons that IT's contribution to improved organizational performance and productivity is still relatively limited. Despite this fact, a survey by the management consultancy firm, A.T. Kearney, indicated that insufficient IT support was recognized and pinpointed by senior executives as one of the top three growth barriers. At the same time and rather paradoxically, IT is not considered by senior executive as one of the top growth enablers. Less than 20 percent of growth initiatives involve IT in the early conceptual or strategic stages. To address this conundrum, I believe that enterprise architecture, coming from computer science/IT, can be co-opted into a more strategic role by CEOs, assisted by dedicated in-house enterprise architects, and used as a framework for strategy implementation.
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Slovakia Showcases the Benefits of the European Union
Tweet Share on Facebook January 2, 2013 CommentPeter Passell is a senior fellow at the Milken Institute, the editor of the Milken Institute Review, and a consultant to the Legatum Institute's Prosperity Index project.
Pop quiz: Which Eastern European economy has made the most progress since it slipped the embrace of the Russian bear? You could make a case for the Czech Republic (highest per capita income in the region) or Poland (in terms of macro stability and good governance) or maybe even tiny Estonia, which has been doggedly dedicated to free markets. But I'll opt for Slovakia, an underdog that many analysts were once inclined to consign to the same category as Soviet-shattered Ukraine and Belarus.
