Interesting article on the financial illiteracy of Gen X and younger. Scary too:
Today, people in their 20s and 30s are more educated than ever before. Some 85% of those aged 25 and older hold a high school diploma, and 27% have a college degree. This generation of adults is also, of course, the most technologically [...]

Filed under: Economics | 2 Comments »

That’s right. All this discussion about standard of living, and the material goods we have at our disposal today that our grandfathers could never have imagined, and we have completely avoided the question of quality.
I’m guessing that our grandfathers would be stunned at the shoddiness of the things we have in our homes. Our rickety [...]

Filed under: Distributism, Economics | 45 Comments »

Talk to me.
In our last comment thread, someone suggested that,
if a family wage was instituted, then bonuses or raises would still be applied appropriately- even if it meant giving raises when the man had a new baby.
To this, commenter Aaron responded:
How exactly does this in particular benefit the employer? Compensation is usually given to high-performers [...]

Filed under: Belloc, Distributism, Economics | 49 Comments »

I ask because he evidently has no concern for what putting someone like Barack Obama in the White House will do to our already sour economy. While he’s just hit $62 billion in personal wealth - making him the richest man in the world - I just saw him say in a CNN interview that [...]

Filed under: Economics, What the...? | 5 Comments »

I was having a conversation with Joe Marier today about Wal Mart, and that led to a conversation about Endicott-Johnson, the company that pioneered “Welfare Capitalism.” E-J was (unbeknownst to me) a big part of my life growing up. I was born in Johnson City, named after George F. Johnson, one of the partners in the [...]

Filed under: Economics | 5 Comments »

Eric, a reader of mine whom I have had the pleasure to meet in person, sent me a great question by e-mail the other day:
So sorry to hear about your insurance troubles. What a mess. The financial pinch you described in your blog post reminded me of a question I had about fair trade, buying [...]

Filed under: Agrarianism, Catholicism, Economics, Interesting Stuff | No Comments »

From the Wall Street Journal this time:

I don’t want to alarm anybody, but maybe it’s time for Americans to start stockpiling food.
No, this is not a drill.
You’ve seen the TV footage of food riots in parts of the developing world. Yes, they’re a long way away from the U.S. But most foodstuffs operate in a [...]

Filed under: "We're All Gonna Die!", Economics, Food | 2 Comments »

We’re not the only ones facing a food crisis. A story I read this morning indicates that Japan is finding its shelves emptied of certain commodities as well:
MARIKO Watanabe admits she could have chosen a better time to take up baking. This week, when the Tokyo housewife visited her local Ito-Yokado supermarket to buy butter [...]

Filed under: Bankrupting America, Economics, Food, The Perils of Globalization | No Comments »

You may recall that I posted something last month about how we couldn’t find any bread flour at our local Sam’s Club. I found it odd, and wondered if it had anything to do with the economic/oil/food crisis we are slip-sliding into, or if it was just a hiccup in the supply chain.
It appears that shortages [...]

Filed under: Bankrupting America, Economics, Food | No Comments »

I’ve talked about our economic woes a bit, despite the fact that I understand economics only slightly better than advanced physics. Today, I’ll let another knucklehead (Glenn Beck) do the talking:

Let me give you three numbers that will put this economic asteroid into perspective: 200 billion, $14.1 trillion, and $53 trillion.

$200 billion is the approximate [...]

Filed under: Bankrupting America, Economics | 1 Comment »