Tag Archives

Archive of posts published in the tag: Mark Perry

Is Capitalism Natural?

By acknowledging human flaws and addressing them, conservatives permit human potential to flourish.  By seeking a non existent perfection socialists require central control and power that frustrates human potential and growth.

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The Racist Minimum Wage

The excellent and telling graph above is from Mark Perry’s Carpe Diem.  The incredible jump correlates very strongly  with higher minimum wages that took place in several large urban areas.

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The Shrinking Middle Class is Not a Bad Thing

Measuring income inequality is more difficult than most realize.  Is it a problem if the middle class is shrinking if the reason is that most are moving into the upper class?  Why isn’t Obama bragging about this?

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Bastiat and Sowell

Mark Perry posts at Carpe Diem at AEI a wonderful collection of quotes from Thomas Sowell and Frederic Bastiat, who share the same birthday and economic insights. Happy 86th birthday to economist Thomas Sowell, one of the greatest living economists

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Wage Price Fixing

from Carpe Diem and Mark Perry, a simple and effective analogy on the minimum wage, What economic lessons can we learn about the $15 minimum wage law from an ‘$8 per pound minimum beef price law’? Economist Walter E. Williams

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Policy Under False Pretenses

from Mark Perry at Carpe Diem,  New BLS data show that for all ‘chief executives,’ the ‘average CEO-to-average worker pay ratio’ is less than 5-to-1 For the sample of 20,620 CEOs reported by the BLS, their average pay increased only

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A State Worshipping Culture

from Mark Perry’s Carpe Diem, this quote from Ayn Rand: Throughout the history of Europe, the values and ideas of its people never changed on one basic point: Europe is a state-worshiping culture. It has always worshipped the power of

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Where Did the Middle Class Go?

From Carpe Diem Monday Night Links   Looking at household income instead of average wages, the chart above paints a much different picture of an America with rising incomes for many American households and lots of upward income mobility, using recently updated

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Thoughts on the Economy 2015 10 02

Steel prices are the lowest they have been in 15 years. In China it is cheaper than cabbage. Stainless and aluminum are also very low. Oil is also bouncing around new lows. A sharp drop in industrial commodities has some

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A Math Problem

  from Carpe Diem at AEI, Who-d a-thunk it? SF minimum wage increased 14% and local Chipotles just raised prices by 10-14%? by Mark Perry excerpt: “There simply isn’t any magic pot of money that lets employers pay higher wages

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Arbitrary Wages

from Mark Perry at Carpe Diem, Why are market-based wages superior to government-mandated minimum wages? There are many reasons, here are three: well, here is one of the three…. b. Government Wages Ignore Economic Realities and Instead Reflect Politics. I

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She Didn’t Build That

from Mark Perry in his blog Carpe Diem, John Tamny on ‘surging lifestyle equality’ and the source of the Clintons’ wealth excerpts: All of which brings us to the latest news about Bill and Hillary Clinton. According to numerous media accounts

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Lifestyle Equality

from Mark Perry in his blog Carpe Diem, John Tamny on ‘surging lifestyle equality’ and the source of the Clintons’ wealth excerpts: The ‘wealth inequality’ decried by clueless economists and opportunistic politicians has been mis-named. What’s a pejorative is unrelentingly

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Measuring Wealth in the Information Age

From Mark Perry at Carpe Diem, Another limitation of GDP accounting – it fails to capture improvements in economic well-being in the Information Age: Excerpt: Bottom Line: Perhaps all of the discussions about GDP being below potential GDP and fretting

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The Dynamic Household

Economist Mark Perry writes in his blog, Carpe Diem, US middle class has disappeared into higher-income groups; recent stagnation explained by changing household demographics? Excerpts:  Here’s another way to understand the dynamic income shift over the last half century that

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The Full Magnitude of a Higher Minimum Wage

from Carpe Diem, Don Boudreaux’s ongoing, excellent coverage of the minimum wage issue And don’t forget: empirical studies today of the effects of changes today in the minimum wage are biased against finding negative employment results because many of the negative results of

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Thoughts on Lower Oil Prices

At first glance the dramatically lower oil prices is great news because just about everyone we know will have more money in their pocket at the end of the week.   The middle class and the lower income will feel

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A Parabolic Tax Curve

From Mark Perry at his AEI- Carpe Diem Blog, Top 400 taxpayers paid almost as much in federal income taxes in 2010 as the entire bottom 50% Early last year Obama reiterated his belief that the wealthiest Americans still aren’t paying

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Cherry-picking CEO Data

Economist Mark Perry writes in Carpe Diem When we consider all US CEOs and all US workers, the ‘CEO-to-worker pay ratio’ falls from 331:1 to below 4:1 Excerpts: The AFL-CIO is comparing: a) the average salary of a small sample (350)

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A Tax on Workers

Mark Perry suggests an enlightening way to view the minimum wage in his blog Carpe Diem: Instead of $10.10 per hour, think of the proposed minimum wage as a $5,700 annual tax per full-time unskilled worker Suppose that instead of

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