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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Debate on raising minimum wages in the USA
Obviously Greg Mankiw is following this debate much more closely than I am, which is very good since I can profit from it and just follow Professor Mankiw’s very recent links to it, on his popular blog.
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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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Found out somewhat late about this, apparently it’s been out there (in its second edition!) for more than a month now. Anyway, prepare for a 1 h 21 min 43 s long video.
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Apparently Wikipedia faces more acts of vandalism originating from Capitol Hill IP addresses than from anywhere else… Below a bit of the USA representatives’ whitewashing (taken over from the Washington Post– you need to sign up first to read it there; you can read the full text also on MSN ):
Last week, Wikipedia temporarily blocked certain Capitol Hill Web addresses from altering any entries in the otherwise wide-open forum.
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