RealClearMarkets Articles

Why doesn’t West Virginia have more debt? The question rates asking in response to a Wall Street Journal editorial which observes that California “is facing huge budget deficits despite an ebullient stock market and capital-gains rush.” The answer to the West Virginia question can be found in the Journal editorial’s observation. Explaining the California deficit and debt situation, the Journal editorial cites analysis from the state’s non-partisan Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) that suggests it's an effect of “spending growth continuing to...

The House Committee on Energy and Commerce on Tuesday will once again plunge into the deep waters of children’s online safety. At this hearing, many familiar pieces of legislation will return for consideration: the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), an app store age verification mandate, a bill to ban children from social media, the privacy reform known as COPPA 2.0, and much more. “Here’s the House plan to protect kids online,” reads the headline from Punchbowl News, which broke the news of the hearing. It seems, however, lawmakers’ grasp of the...

As both right- and left-leaning forms of socialism gain traction in pockets across America, we risk losing sight of the core principles that made it the most prosperous, innovative, and opportunity-rich nation on earth. Revisiting the insights of great economists is a timely reminder that capitalism remains the only system capable of converting human knowledge, ingenuity, and self-interest into improved living standards for all. Why Central Planning Cannot Compete with Free Markets In his famous essay The Use of Knowledge in Society (1945), Friedrich Hayek explained why socialism and...

Bad news for the IRS is good news for Americans. And recently, we learned that an IRS scheme to consolidate even more power over our taxes is no more. It was called Direct File, a program that allowed taxpayers to file their taxes directly with the IRS rather than through a third party like an accountant or TurboTax. It was a pilot program available to 30 million taxpayers across 25 states, and yet only 140,000 ended up using it.  In addition to the complexity and usability concerns cited in an Inspector General report, taxpayers were likely sensitive to the fact that using...

President Trump’s recent Truth Social warning about the rise of “Woke AI” echoes his prior executive order, Preventing Woke AI in the Federal Government, which seeks to confront artificial intelligence systems trained or tuned to reflect ideological narratives rather than objective truth. And yet, even as that order takes aim at political bias and progressive orthodoxy in AI, it arguably leaves unnamed one of the most consequential mechanisms by which ideology enters algorithmic systems: the doctrine of “disparate impact.” “Woke AI,” according to...

Nearly every state now participates in major interstate compacts that let doctors and nurses practice across state lines, expanding the healthcare workforce and giving patients more options. Yet when it comes to advanced practice nurses—the clinicians who could most immediately fill the gap in primary care—fewer states have jumped on board. The nation is rapidly adopting streamlined licensing for physicians and nurses, but the Advanced Practice Registered Nurse (APRN) Compact remains stuck, and patients are paying the price. Only four states have joined the APRN Compact, with...

One of Russell Vought’s top regulatory policies upon taking the helm at OMB this year was, according to a former Trump administration official, the implementation of regulations that would reduce the number of Social Security disability benefits awarded to older individuals. Current regulations require Social Security to consider older age as a factor in making disability determinations. The Vought proposal sought to reverse that. Disability attorneys scored a major victory last week when they brought Vought’s proposal down. Jason Turkish, a disability...

“No matter your business, you cannot stay still for any length of time or your competitors will scratch and claw all over you.” That’s how Home Depot co-founder Arthur Blank described life in the real, ruthless world of commerce. Please contemplate Blank’s dose of reality alongside all the pearl-clutching from the education-obsessed over a new study showing that one out of eight University of California, San Diego (UCSD) freshmen “have math skills ‘that fall below middle-school level.’” According to an editorial in the Wall Street Journal that...

George Will describes it as "presentism" whereby modern views on morality are imposed on past actions. Will’s crucial point is that if we continue down this path of judging the past through a present-tense lens, eventually those judging and canceling will find themselves being judged and canceled. It’s just a comment that whatever the underlying truth about economist Lawrence Summers’s present-day expressions of “shame” about the past, the fact that his past actions elicited no outrage from left, right or in between calls into question his present-day...

A new Rosenberg Research indicator shows that only 18 percent of the U.S. population now lives in regions classified as economically expanding—the lowest share since May 2020. This collapse in the breadth of growth is one of the clearest statistical signs that the United States may already be in a hidden or rolling recession, even as headline GDP and employment data indicate otherwise. The eighteen percent matches levels observed only during sharp downturns in 2001, 2008, and 2020--each of which corresponds to a deep recession.  The 18 percent validates a 2023...

The United States is in the midst of a housing crisis. Increases in the cost to buy or rent were the largest driver of inflation since 2020. But now, instead of taking the problem head on, lawmakers want to limit our options and exacerbate this crisis. Across the nation, elected officials from both the right and the left have laid blame for the housing crisis onto single-family rental institutions, claiming that large Wall Street-backed companies are snapping up homes, inflating prices, blocking access to the American Dream, and creating a housing crisis. Their solution? Ban or cap...

Virginia Governor-elect Abigail Spanberger won the election by portraying herself as a moderate or centrist Democrat whose priority was “affordability.” This is nothing new for her. Spanberger first came to national prominence after the 2020 elections when she blamed Democrats' poor performance in House and Senate races on the association of too many Democrats with radical positions—like defunding the police and an open embrace of socialism. However, a look at her actual record in the House shows she is far from a moderate. For example, Spanberger received an F...

“Literally put me in front of a whiteboard, and I can come up with 100 ideas in an hour.” That’s what Amazon founder Jeff Bezos told a gathering of technology entrepreneurs last month in Italy. Bezos’s restless mind rates extra thought on Thanksgiving. While Thanksgiving is a national holiday decreed by government, it’s important to remember that the abundance Thanksgiving embodies is a tribute to the doers like Bezos who can’t sit still. With Amazon, Bezos quite literally brought the plenty of the world to the doorsteps of the world. Notable about...

What, pray tell, is a Land Acknowledgement? It is a public statement made by woke land owners. In such a declaration they in effect maintain that they do not really own the territory to which they have legal title. In effect, they opine that while, indeed, they hold rights to their properties, these are not really justified. Instead, in justice, in their opinion, their legally held terrain properly belongs to the descendants of those who occupied the land in question thousands, maybe tens of thousands of years ago. Who issues such announcements? So called progressives (they are really...

Remember in 2008 when the experts were calling for nationwide housing destruction to allegedly save the U.S. economy from falling housing prices? It’s something to contemplate as experts like Ezra Klein ask in 2025 “How many more homes” we Americans supposedly need. What producers of smartphones, cars and bananas would give for Klein’s crystal ball… Briefly pivoting away from a consumptive market item the quantity and complexity of which no one, including actual developers, can possibly understand, we can think about another source of excitement for pundits who...

Politicians have long been tempted by price ceilings. From rent controls to gas price caps, legally restricting prices has always offered an easy applause line: “We’re helping you, the little guy.” But every economics student quickly learns something very different: price ceilings do not make goods less scarce. They simply suppress the best means we have to cope with scarcity, producing harmful consequences. A good illustration is the growing bipartisan bloc in Congress, led by Sens Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Josh Hawley (R-MO), that is pushing to cap credit-card...

In the past, home ownership has been an important part of the American dream. Buying a home was the most important investment decision that citizens made. That investment could provide for one’s retirement; and equity in the home could be used to borrow for education, health care, and emergency expenditures. Unfortunately, for many citizens, and especially for younger generations, the dream of home ownership is disappearing. Inflationary increases in home prices are pricing many citizens out of the housing market. Inflationary increases in property taxes are taxing some citizens out of...

Bloomberg recently reported that Amazon is set to raise $15 billion in an upcoming bond sale. The funds will be used to continue Amazon’s AI buildout. Better yet for the purposes of this piece, the sizable bond issuance signals impressive market confidence about Amazon’s future. Entities that are doing well, and expected to do better, can borrow a little or a lot very easily. Those with a less certain future can’t borrow. Money is ruthless. Amazon shows us why. Traveling back in time to 2001, Amazon could claim roughly $2.17 billion in debt. Notable about the previous number...

The most pleasant surprise in my first year teaching economics and government full-time was being asked to take-on a financial literacy course as well.  My friends and family tease me about keeping the thermostat at 78 during Texas summers, but it looks like it paid off. Current events have helped illuminate the content of that class just as they have for econ and gov.  The Wall Street Journal recently detailed how consumers are making “every penny count” on groceries.  Some are diluting household cleaners, while others are merely dabbing their...