The effect of Government Regulation on Economic growth.
John W. Dawson
Department of Economics
Appalachian State University
Boone, NC, 28608-2051
dawsonjw@appstate.edu
John J. Seater
Department of Economics
North Carolina State University
Raleigh, NC, 27695
john_seater@ncsu.edu
Abstract
We introduce a new time series measure of the extent of federal regulation in the U.S. and use it to
investigate the relationship between federal regulation and macroeconomic performance. We find that regulation has statistically and economically significant effects on aggregate output and the factors that produce it–total factor productivity (TFP), physical capital, and labor. Regulation has caused substantial reductions in the growth rates of both output and TFP and has had effects on the trends in capital and labor that vary over time in both sign and magnitude. Regulation also affects deviations about the trends in output and its factors of production, and the effects differ across dependent variables. Regulation changes the way output is produced by changing the mix of inputs. Changes in regulation offer a straightforward explanation for the productivity slowdown of the 1970s. Qualitatively and quantitatively, our results agree with those obtained from cross-section and panel measures of regulation using cross-country data.
Keywords: Regulation; macroeconomic performance; economic growth; productivity slowdown
READ IT HERE
Wednesday, October 30, 2013
Obamacare Lies
President Obama promised if your liked your doctor and your health plan, you could keep them.
But today, millions of Americans are getting cancellation notices. The administration knew they wouldn't be able to keep their plans, yet it insisted otherwise.
The failure of HealthCare.gov is just the beginning. Obamacare has been one broken promise after another. We can’t stop fighting to dismantle the health-care law. We've got to get health-care reform right. We need to fix what’s broken – not break what’s working.
A reform-minded Congress is key to our effort. That’s why I’m asking for your support today.
In just a few days, we’ll hit an important fundraising deadline. Will you please contribute $100, $50, $25, or whatever you can today to help our cause?
The Left will do whatever it takes to strengthen its grip on Washington. Your donation will keep our movement strong.
Thanks,
Paul Ryan
Monday, October 28, 2013
Obamacare: It's all about gathering data
And you really believe this idiot Obama cares about your health. In sales they say "on every transaction, someone does the selling and someone get's sold". Well, idiots, you got sold. Check out this chart:
http://www.cchfreedom.org/files/files/TheObamacareHub.pdf
http://www.cchfreedom.org/files/files/TheObamacareHub.pdf
Friday, October 25, 2013
Wednesday, October 23, 2013
Says the word "Dhimmitude" is on page 107 of the health care law and means "Muslims are specifically exempted from the government mandate to purchase insurance."
'Dhimmitude' on page 107 of the health care law exempts Muslims, claims chain email
Share this story:
Have you ever heard of "Dhimmitude"? A chain email claims "dhimmitude" is on page 107 of the health care law, and it means Muslims will be exempt from the health care law.
We don’t want to keep you in suspense, so we’ll tell it to you straight: The word "dhimmitude" is not in the health care law.
We know this because of our previous reporting on the law, and also because we did a full-text search on both the main law (the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act) and acompanion law (the Health Care and Reconciliation Act). It’s not in either one.
What is "Dhimmitude"? Well, here’s what the email claims:
Dhimmitude -- I had never heard the word until now. I typed it into Google and started reading. Pretty interesting. It's on page 107 of the health care bill. I looked this up on Google and yep, it exists. It is a REAL word.
READ MORE
Its not in there folks relax.
I searched the entire law for those words its not in there "Mayan end of the world crazies".
Its not in there folks relax.
I searched the entire law for those words its not in there "Mayan end of the world crazies".
Saturday, October 19, 2013
Joke of the day
A man died and went to heaven. As he stood in front of St. Peter at the Pearly Gates, he saw a huge wall of clocks behind him.
He asked, “What are all those clocks?”
St. Peter answered, “Those are Lie-Clocks. Everyone on Earth has a Lie-Clock. Every time you lie the hands on your clock will move.”
“Oh,” said the man, “whose clock is that?”
“That’s Mother Teresa’s. The hands have never moved, indicating that she never told a lie.”
“Incredible,” said the man.
“That’s Abraham Lincoln’s clock. The hands have moved twice, telling us that Abe told only two lies in his entire life,” St. Peter informed him.
“Where’s Obama’s clock?”
“His clock is in Jesus’s office. He’s using it as a ceiling fan.”
He asked, “What are all those clocks?”
St. Peter answered, “Those are Lie-Clocks. Everyone on Earth has a Lie-Clock. Every time you lie the hands on your clock will move.”
“Oh,” said the man, “whose clock is that?”
“That’s Mother Teresa’s. The hands have never moved, indicating that she never told a lie.”
“Incredible,” said the man.
“That’s Abraham Lincoln’s clock. The hands have moved twice, telling us that Abe told only two lies in his entire life,” St. Peter informed him.
“Where’s Obama’s clock?”
“His clock is in Jesus’s office. He’s using it as a ceiling fan.”
Sunday, October 13, 2013
They’re Coming For Your Savings
Submitted by John Rubino via The Dollar Collapse blog,
Another of history’s many lessons is that governments under pressure become thieves. And today’s governments are under a lot of pressure.
Before we look at the coming wave of asset confiscations, let’s stroll through some notable episodes of the past, just to make the point that government theft of private wealth is actually pretty common.
• Ancient Rome had a rule called “proscription” that allowed the government to execute and then confiscate the assets of anyone found guilty of “crimes against the state.” After the death of Julius Caesar in 44 BC, three men, Mark Anthony, Lepidus, and Caesar’s adopted son Octavian, formed a group they called the Second Triumvirate and divided the Empire between them. But two rivals, Brutus and Cassius, formed an army with which they planned to take the Empire for themselves. The Triumvirate needed money to fund an army of its own, and decided the best way to raise it was by kicking the proscription process into overdrive. They drew up a list of several hundred wealthy Romans, accused them of crimes, executed them and took their property.
• In the mid-1530s, English king Henry VIII was short of funds, so he seized the country’s monasteries and claimed their property and income for the Crown. As historian G. J. Meyer tells it in The Tudors: The Complete Story of England’s Most Notorious Dynasty:
“By April fat trunks were being hauled into London filled with gold and silver plate, jewelry, and other treasures accumulated by the monasteries over the centuries. With them came money from the sale of church bells, lead stripped from the roofs of monastic buildings, and livestock, furnishings, and equipment. Some of the confiscated land was sold – enough to bring in £30,000 – and what was not sold generated tens of thousands of pounds in annual rents. The longer the confiscations continued, the smaller the possibility of their ever being reversed or even stopped from going further. The money was spent almost as quickly as it flooded in – so quickly that any attempt to restore the monasteries to what they had been before the suppression would have meant financial ruin for the Crown. Nor would those involved in the work of the suppression … ever be willing to part with what they were skimming off for themselves.”
• Soon after the French Revolution in 1789, the new government confiscated lands and other property of the Catholic Church and used the proceeds to back a new form of paper currency called assignats. The resulting money printing binge quickly spun out of control, resulting in hyperinflation and the rise of Napoleon.
• During the US Civil War, Congress passed laws confiscating property used for “insurrectionary purposes” and of citizens generally engaged in rebellion.
• In 1933, in the depths of the Great Depression, president Franklin Roosevelt banned the private ownership of gold and ordered US citizens to turn in their gold. Those who did were paid in paper dollars at the then current rate of $20.67 per ounce. Once the confiscation was complete, the dollar was devalued to $35 per ounce of gold, effectively stealing 70 percent of the wealth of those who surrendered their gold.
• In 1942, after entering World War II, the US moved all Japanese citizens within its borders to concentration camps and sold off their property. The detainees were released in 1945, given $25 and a train ticket home – without being reimbursed for their losses.
Since the 2008 financial crisis, various kinds of capital controls and asset confiscations have become common. A few examples:
• Iceland required that firms seeking to invest abroad get permission from the central bank and that individual Icelanders get government authorization to buy foreign currency or travel overseas.
• Greece pulled funds directly from bank and brokerage accounts of suspected tax evaders, without prior notice or judicial due process.
• Argentina banned the purchase of U.S. dollars for personal savings and required banks to make loans in pesos at rates considerably below the true inflation rate.
• The US Fed proposed that money market funds be allowed to limit withdrawals of customer cash in times of market stress.
• Cyprus, a eurozone country, responded to a series of bank failures by confiscating 47.5% of domestic bank accounts over €100,000.
• Poland in September responded to a budgetary shortfall by confiscating the assets of the country’s private pension funds without offering any compensation.
• Spain was recently revealed to have looted its largest public pension fund, the Social Security Reserve Fund, by ordering it to use its cash to buy Spanish government bonds. Currently 90% percent of the €65 billion fund had been invested in Spanish sovereign paper, leaving the fund’s beneficiaries dependent on future governments’ ability to manage their finances.
Now for the big one, reported by Automatic Earth on Saturday October 12:
The IMF Proposes A 10% Supertax On All Eurozone Household Savings
This is a story that should raise an eyebrow or two on every single face in Europe, and beyond. I saw the first bits of it on a Belgian site named Express.be, whose writers in turn had stumbled upon an article in French newspaper Le Figaro, whose writer Jean-Pierre Robin had leafed through a brand new IMF report (yes, there are certain linguistic advantages in being Dutch, Canadian AND Québecois). In the report, the IMF talks about a proposal to tax everybody’s savings, in the Eurozone. Looks like they just need to figure out by how much.The IMF, I’m following Mr. Robin here, addresses the issue of the sustainability of the debt levels of developed nations, Europe, US, Japan, which today are on average 110% of GDP, or 35% more than in 2007. Such debt levels are unprecedented, other than right after the world wars. So, the Fund reasons, it’s time for radical solutions.The IMF refers to a few studies, like one from 1990 by Barry Eichengreen on historical precedents, one from April 2013 by Saxo Bank chief economist Steen Jakobsen, who saw a 10% general asset tax as needed to repair government debt levels, and one by German economist Stefan Bach, who concluded that if all Germans owning more than €250,000, representing €2.95 trillion in wealth, were “supertaxed” on their assets at a 3.4% rate, the government could collect €100 billion, or 4% of GDP.French investor site monfinancier.com talks about people close to the Elysée government discussing how a 17% supertax on all French savings over €100,000 would clear all government debt. The site is not the only voice to mention that raising “normal” taxes on either individuals or corporations is no longer viable, since it would risk plunging various economies into recession or depression.Here’s what the October 2013 IMF report, entitled Fiscal Monitor : Taxing Times, literally says on the topic, in the chapter called:Taxing Our Way Out Of – Or Into? – Trouble
The sharp deterioration of the public finances in many countries has revived interest in a capital levy, a one-off tax on private wealth, as an exceptional measure to restore debt sustainability. (1) The appeal is that such a tax, if it is implemented before avoidance is possible, and there is a belief that it will never be repeated, does not distort behavior (and may be seen by some as fair).There have been illustrious supporters, including Pigou, Ricardo, Schumpeter, and, until he changed his mind, Keynes. The conditions for success are strong, but also need to be weighed against the risks of the alternatives, which include repudiating public debt or inflating it away (these, in turn, are a particular form of wealth tax on bondholders that also falls on non-residents).It should probably be obvious that there is one key sentence here, one which explains why the IMF is seriously considering the capital levy (supertax) option, even if it’s presented as hypothetical:The appeal is that such a tax, if it is implemented before avoidance is possible, and there is a belief that it will never be repeated, does not distort behavior (and may be seen by some as fair).It all hangs on the IMF’s notion – or hope – that it can be implemented by stealth, before people have the chance to put their money somewhere else (and let’s assume they’re not thinking of digging in backyards, and leave tax havens alone for now). Also, that after the initial blow, people will accept the tax because they are confident it’s a one-time only thing. And finally, that a sense of justice will prevail among a population, a substantial part of whom will have little, if anything, left to tax.
Some thoughts
Will more countries introduce capital controls or asset confiscations in the next few years? Duh, of course. Debt levels are unmanageable, so they have to be lowered. And there are only three ways to do it: deflationary collapse that wipes out the debt through default, inflation that wipes out the debt by destroying the world’s major currencies, or stealing enough private sector wealth to reset the clock. Option one – depression – is political poison so will be avoided at all costs. Option two is being tried and is failing because the deflationary effect of trillions of dollars of bad debt more or less equals the inflationary impact of trillions of dollars of new currency.
Will more countries introduce capital controls or asset confiscations in the next few years? Duh, of course. Debt levels are unmanageable, so they have to be lowered. And there are only three ways to do it: deflationary collapse that wipes out the debt through default, inflation that wipes out the debt by destroying the world’s major currencies, or stealing enough private sector wealth to reset the clock. Option one – depression – is political poison so will be avoided at all costs. Option two is being tried and is failing because the deflationary effect of trillions of dollars of bad debt more or less equals the inflationary impact of trillions of dollars of new currency.
That just leaves door number three, demonize the successful and take what they’ve accumulated. Recall from the historical list that opened this post that governments like to pick on members of society who 1) have lots of money and 2) have lots of enemies or can easily be framed for crimes. This time around it will be “the rich” who are living well at the expense of the rest of us. The trick will be to define “rich” down far enough to make possible the confiscation of middle-class IRAs and 401(K)s, since that’s where the real money is.
Interesting that the build-up to asset confiscation is coinciding with a coordinated take-down of gold and silver, the two assets that will be hardest to steal when the time comes.
Thursday, October 10, 2013
Tuesday, October 8, 2013
Students who refuse to be micro-chipped are punished by tyrannical Texas schools
The surveillance society continues to expand across America, with those who refuse to go along subject to recriminations and reprisals.
That’s what’s happening to students at John Jay High School and Anson Jones Middle School in San Antonio whose parents refuse to have their children tracked by school officials.
According to reports, the school districts implemented new rules Oct. 1 that require each student to attend classes with photo ID cards embedded with a radio-frequency identification (RFID) chip, so officials are able to track every pupil’s location. Educators have said the requirement is necessary to stem rampant truancy, which is, in turn, taking a huge chunk out of the school’s funding. If the program is eventually judged to be effective, officials plan to roll it out to all 112 schools in the district, covering some 100,000 students.
Shocking: Obamacare Page 1,004: You Must Have RFID Chip Implanted in Your Body
On Sunday March 21, 2010 the Senate Healthcare bill HR3200 was passed and signed into law the following Tuesday. Like I said before, there are a legion of horrible and just plain evil aspects to this bill and I’m sure you’ve heard a lot them by now. I don’t want to discount them but what cannot be missed here is this new law now opens a prophetic door on a magnitude not seen since the reformation of Israel.
This new law requires an RFID chip implanted in all of us. This chip will not only contain your personal information with tracking capability but it will also be linked to your bank account. And get this, Page 1004 of the new law (dictating the timing of this chip), reads, and I quote: “Not later than 36 months after the date of the enactment”. It is now the law of the land that by March 23rd 2013 we will all be required to have an RFID chip underneath our skin and this chip will be link to our bank accounts as well as have our personal records and tracking capability built into it.
Sunday, October 6, 2013
Must Read: Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government Is Smarter
This book pretty much sums up the problem. Political Ignorance. Someone once said, those who don't understand or participate in Politics, will be ruled by their inferiors.
Abstract: One of the biggest problems with modern democracy is that most of the public is usually ignorant of politics and government. Often, many people understand that their votes are unlikely to change the outcome of an election and don't see the point in learning much about politics. This may be rational, but it creates a nation of people with little political knowledge and little ability to objectively evaluate what they do know.
In Democracy and Political Ignorance, Ilya Somin mines the depths of ignorance in America and reveals the extent to which it is a major problem for democracy. Somin weighs various options for solving this problem, arguing that political ignorance is best mitigated and its effects lessened by decentralizing and limiting government. Somin provocatively argues that people make better decisions when they choose what to purchase in the market or which state or local government to live under, than when they vote at the ballot box, because they have stronger incentives to acquire relevant information and to use it wisely.
Abstract: One of the biggest problems with modern democracy is that most of the public is usually ignorant of politics and government. Often, many people understand that their votes are unlikely to change the outcome of an election and don't see the point in learning much about politics. This may be rational, but it creates a nation of people with little political knowledge and little ability to objectively evaluate what they do know.
In Democracy and Political Ignorance, Ilya Somin mines the depths of ignorance in America and reveals the extent to which it is a major problem for democracy. Somin weighs various options for solving this problem, arguing that political ignorance is best mitigated and its effects lessened by decentralizing and limiting government. Somin provocatively argues that people make better decisions when they choose what to purchase in the market or which state or local government to live under, than when they vote at the ballot box, because they have stronger incentives to acquire relevant information and to use it wisely.
Lake Mead property owners forced out until shutdown ends
Lake Mead property owners forced out until shutdown ends: The government shutdown is being felt close to home for some locals. They say they're being forced out of private homes on Lake Mead because they sit on federal land.
Friday, October 4, 2013
Government Officials Fail Honesty Standards of 12 Year Olds
Government leaders have been caught in lie after lie about spying ... but keep on spouting new lies:
- The heads of the intelligence services have repeatedly been caught lying about spying ... again and againand again and again. Security expert Bruce Schneier writes: "This is getting silly ... Now they're just looking shiftier and shiftier." It has gotten so bad that a leading groups concludes: "US Government Fails Honesty Standards of 12 Year Olds". And even liberal publications are forced to conclude that Obama is intentionally lying about spying
- Obama says he'll rein in spying ... but his words and deeds indicate that he won't. Indeed, Obamaappointed the fox to guard the chicken coop
- While the Obama administration is spying on everyone in the country – it is at the same time the most secretive administration ever (background). That’s despite Obama saying he’s running the mosttransparent administration ever
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
LinkWithin
