TCS Daily : June 2010 Archives
Double-Dip Trade Is Probably Overdone
Stocks took a real drubbing on Tuesday, with the Dow off 268 points and the major indexes basically falling 3 percent. Call it the double-dip trade.
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Counting Foreigners in the U.S. Census
The federal government is currently conducting its decennial exercise: the census. Some may think the Constitution requires the feds to conduct the census in a certain manner. But there are only two iterations of the word "census" in the entire Constitution.
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Congress's Medicare Canary
WASHINGTON-Pity the nation's seniors. Just as the first baby-boomers (born in 1946) are preparing to sign up for Medicare in 2011, Congress has cut the fees that Medicare will pay to physicians, ensuring that docs take fewer Medicare patients. Or has it?
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Orszag's Broken Cost-Cutting Promises
For the most part, Congressional hearings are a sleepy affair, nothing like the dramatic television portrayal with hard questions from flashy politicians and gillions of reporters hanging on every word. Most witnesses tend to be noncontroversial, sticking to pre-wr
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The KISS Principle
Over the past 30 years Federal Tax receipts (Corporate, Personal, Estate, Excise, Gift, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, et al) have averaged less than 20% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Read that again, and don't think for a minute that it's not a large numb
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Addicted to Prosperity
Back in 2006, George W. Bush declared that the US is "addicted to oil." Since then, that phrase has been repeated ad nauseum by politicos on both the Left and the Right. But on Tuesday night, President Obama took the addiction meme to an entirely new level of inani
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BP, the White House, and Congress Are All Dirty
Amidst all the political jockeying over the BP catastrophe, the main players are missing what is really uppermost on America's mind: It's the spill rate, stupid. It's jobs, stupid. It's the economy, stupid. And none of it is happening.
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Obama Declares War on Oil
The president has it wrong. The BP oil spill is not, as he implied in last night's speech, a new 9/11. Oil is not "assaulting our shores and our citizens," and we're not waging a "battle" against it. The oil catastrophe cannot and should not be compared to the war
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Thinking Outside the Base
The U.S. military needs to reinvent itself. If it continues to hold on to antiquated paradigms, U.S. national security could be at risk.
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The Dollar's Demise is Not Inevitable
In a recent American Thinker article, "The Dollar's Inevitable Demise," author Vasko Kohlmayer compares the federal debt to the American economy, or GDP. Mr. Kohlmayer begins his article by correctly pegging GDP at "roughly $14 trillion." Then he trots out the "tot
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'Medium Term' Ben Sucks Up to Spendthrift Congress
When Ben Bernanke testified a couple of days ago before the House Budget Committee, he gave a fairly upbeat forecast of 3.5 percent growth this year, and somewhat stronger growth in 2011. Okay, fine.
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The Danger of High Taxes On Carried Interest
Buried in the tax extenders bill that will be up for a vote in the Senate next week, after passing the House on May 28, are provisions altering the current capital gains treatment of profits earned by real estate, venture capital, private equity and other investmen
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Four Excellent Ideas on Education, but How Do We Make Them Happen?
The requirement for innovation in order to drive U.S. economic growth -- and the tensions this creates -- is something I believe is central to our political debates in ways that are not always well articulated.
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The Message of Falling Stocks & Rising Gold
"Wall Street in a Slow Crash" was the headline splashed on Dow Jones' MarketWatch, one of the top financial websites, yesterday afternoon. To be sure, the Dow suffered yet another down day on Monday, shedding 115 points. And the broad-based S&P 500 is off 14 percen
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The Deceptive Debt Ratio
The United States has a growing debt problem. It also has a problem measuring the same. The statistic normally used is the "Debt to GDP" ratio, referring to the amount of debt versus the nation's sum total of transactions. As of Q1 2010, the US debt to GDP ratio wa
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The Senseless Census: A Solution
The original purpose of the census was apportionment -- the drawing of congressional districts so that each would contain roughly the same number of Americans. To do this, the census must count heads and get their addresses. This has not been a mystery since the ad
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Stocks and the BP Catastrophe
It is noteworthy that the BP oil explosion occurred on April 20. Three days later, on April 23, the market peaked. Is this is a coincidence? Or is Mr. Market telling us something that we do not yet fathom?
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