Very pertinent recent viewpoints of Gary Becker and Richard Posner on the issue of whether the debt of students to finance their college education is too high, as the new Congress claims (they also blogged about these issues – focusing at that time on commercial vs.
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On raising the federal minimum wage in the USA
I largely agree with Gary Becker and Richard Posner with reference to the Democrat proposal for raising the minimum wage in the USA. Despite the fact that the proposal is also supported (and to some extent, ignited to start with) by many remarkable economists, I do not think there is any undisputed, clear, evidence that the benefits would outweigh the costs, and moreover there are better alternatives that can be used towards the same (declared) goals (as, for instance, the Earned Income Tax Credit, first championed as the “negative income tax” by the late Milton Friedman; as Posner discusses in his post mentioned above, why not work towards making that more generous, since the EITC is probably a less inefficient tax than the minimum wage).
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Some believe that Glenn Hubbard didn’t take it so well when Ben Bernanke was chosen Fed Chairman. Among them, the Columbia Business School students are by far the most creative…
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An excellent economics viewpoint of Gary Becker on legalizing polygamy.