Credit Card Fees

With regulation threatening their current business model, credit card companies are responding with new fees, Sandra Block reports for USA Today. Starting next year, Bank of America will charge a small number of customers an annual fee, ranging from $29 to $99. The bank has characterized the fee as experimental. But card holders who have never carried a balance or paid ...

Work Harder for No Extra Money

Scott Adams nails another one: The actual exchanges aren't so callous or direct, of course, but this is the essence of "exempt" employment.

The Great Green Jobs Claim

I periodically hear this during presidential campaigns and when various elected officials are trying to push a green policy, often in response to global warming. Because of [insert environmental problem here] we need to pursue a policies that will promote [insert one or more alternative fuel/energy sources here]. And not only will it address [the environmental problem noted above], but ...

Breaking: Homeless Have No Homes

An odd feature at NYT reports that homeless shelters are seeing a rise in former home owners who were foreclosed on. Only three years ago, foreclosure was rarely a factor in how people became homeless. But among the homeless people that social service agencies have helped over the last year, an average of 10 percent lost homes to foreclosure, according to ...

UAW Negotiating with Itself

Mickey Kaus noted the other day that the UAW, which owns large stakes in both GM and Chrysler without paying a cent thanks to their support for the election of President Obama, is cutting their own companies a break and sticking it to Ford. I knew they'd find a way to punish Ford: The new UAW contract with Ford apparently does not give ...

Punt the NFL

Glenn Reynolds links some poor sap who is angry at the NFL because Rush Limbaugh has been dumped from the group bidding for the Rams and is going to start a one-man boycott under the banner "Punt the NFL." I have cancelled my DirecTV NFL Sunday Ticket package (including the Supercast). I will not watch ONE MINUTE of NFL games or ...

Pilot Pay: Supply and Demand

The hard luck story of Bryan Lawlor demonstrates the brutality of the free market. The dark blue captain’s hat, with its golden oak-leaf clusters, sits atop a bookcase in Bryan Lawlor’s home, out of reach of the children. The uniform their father wears still displays the four stripes of a commercial airline captain, but the hat stays home. The rules forbid ...

Health Care Reform Tax on Low Income Earners

James Capretta does a back of the envelope calculation on the Baucus health care reform bill and concludes that it would be like having a 70% marginal tax rate on the low income. According to CBO, family coverage in 2016 is likely to cost about $14,400 under the so-called “silver option” in the health-care reform plan sponsored by Senate Finance Committee ...

Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson Win Nobel Prize

For the first time, a woman has won a share of the Nobel Prize for economics. The 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics will be shared by Elinor Ostrom and Oliver E. Williamson. Ostrom, professor of political science and professor at the School of Public and Environmental Affairs, both at Indiana University at Bloomington, was honored for "her analysis of economic ...

Niche Markets and the Internet

One of the coolest things about the internet, in my opinion, is the way that it opens up markets for goods that might not be economically viable locally, but are economically viable when every business in the world has a global reach. This has opened us up to a vast array of goods and services that simply weren't economically ...

Fly Green: Do Your Business First

Amusing but smart: Like many things in Japan, the message is subtle. At least Japan's All Nippon Airways (ANA) hopes it is, now that the nation's second largest airline has started quietly asking passengers in Japanese to use the bathroom before boarding 38 domestic flights and four international flights between Tokyo and Singapore. The request is part of the airline's "ecological ...

Windows 7 Huge Upgrade, Upgrading Impossible

Walter Mossberg says Microsoft's latest operating system, Windows 7, is good enough to help erase memories of the Vista fiasco. Not only is it "the best version of Windows Microsoft has produced" and "a boost to productivity and a pleasure to use" but it's every bit as good as Apple's Snow Leopard. Windows 7 introduces real advances in organizing your ...

Fighting the Taliban by Lowering Taxes

Matthew Yglesias suggests that one thing that could aid the fight in Afghanistan would be to lower tariffs against Afghan goods and motivate our allies to do the same.If I’m reading these slides right then textile products made in Afghanistan are not eligible for duty-free sale in the United States. Changing that rule might encourage some factory-building in Afghanistan. Similarly ...

Reich: Government Should Spend Even More

Robert Reich sees a grim future  on the jobs front: Unemployment will almost certainly in double-digits next year -- and may remain there for some time. And for every person who shows up as unemployed in the Bureau of Labor Statistics' household survey, you can bet there's another either too discouraged to look for work or working part time who'd rather ...

Stimulus Spending Doesn’t Work – Tax Cuts Do

Via Jonathan Adler, I see that world-renowned economist Robert Barro and his student, Charles Redlick, takes to WSJ to summarize their research report showing that stimulus spending doesn't work. Oddly, take cuts do. The bottom line is this: The available empirical evidence does not support the idea that spending multipliers typically exceed one, and thus spending stimulus programs will likely ...