Don Boudreaux comments on the impact and causes of the “trade deficit” again today. Why do foreigners willingly ship more goods and services to the United States than they demand in return? The answer is that foreigners find America to be an astonishingly attractive place to invest. … Some critics respond by pointing out that much foreign investment today is not made in the private sector where market forces can be relied upon to...
First, the Good News: The recently (by which I mean: occurring over the last 2 years) rising gas prices have yet to show any significant impact on the auto-industry. “So far, the perceived gas price increases have not had any discernable impact on new-vehicle buying patterns, at least with regard to the size of the engine,” said Tom Libby, senior director of industry analysis at the division of Westlake Village, Calif.-based market researcher J.D....
President Bush has vilified our “addiction to oil,” in his February State of the Union address and has called for more research into alternative fuels – suggesting such pie-in-the-sky alternatives as hydrogen, which would require a total infrastructure overhaul, nationwide. But what of Ethanol? Bush’s energy bill last year, put into effect this year a new ethanol mandate, requiring a certain percentage of ethanol blended in all gasoline. A recent article on CNN attests...
