Tim Worstall

Most economists attribute Venezuela’s soaring inflation to loose monetary policy, exchange controls, devaluation and anaemic domestic production, dynamics that show no sign of abating. “The government has boxed itself in with a misguided policy mix of rampant spending and price and foreign exchange controls that has resulted in a growing output gap and galloping inflation,” [...]

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There may not be a nation in the world that needs high-speed trains more than Canada does. We’re a big country, with long, boring highways between our lonely cities… Large, sparesly populated, places are probably the last place you would want to build high speed railways.

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Not the one The Guardian Leader meant to be making of course. The government announced benefits would no longer be pegged to the overall cost of running a home, but merely the cost of shopping. Everyone knows that the cost of housing tends to rise faster than that of baked beans, so the exclusion of [...]

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In this essay, I argue that neither non-economist bloggers, nor economists who portray economics —especially macroeconomic policy— as a simple enterprise with clear conclusions, are likely to contibute any insight to discussion of economics and, as a result, should be ignored by an open-minded lay public. And to a large extent he’s right. Although I [...]

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It would appear that the tax cut multiplier is larger than the government spending multiplier. And that thus the correct method of creating fiscal expansion, of boosting AD, is to cut taxes, not raise spending. Perhaps the most compelling research on this subject is a very recent study by my colleagues Alberto Alesina and Silvia [...]

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At the ASI. We don’t seem to have a lot of empirical evidence that Keynesian fiscal stimulus actually works….

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The impact of George Osborne‘s emergency budget on the poor has been revealed in a study that finds the country’s least well-off families face cuts equivalent to 21.7% of their household income. That means they will be hit six times harder than the very richest by the coalition’s deficit-cutting measures. The study, the first to [...]

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Mr Duncan Smith, the MP for Lord Tebbit’s former parliamentary seat of Chingford, disclosed that ministers were drawing up plans to encourage jobless people living in council houses to move out of unemployment black spots to homes in other areas, perhaps hundreds of miles away. The former Conservative Party leader said millions of people were [...]

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The free towels? That evolved from an idea to attract more tourists by attaining spa status for the city’s public pools, which have seawater and sulfur baths. For accreditation under certain European Union rules, however, a spa has to offer free towels, so that became a campaign slogan. You what? The government of 500 million [...]

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At El Reg again. Why do people keep saying that markets are short term in their outlook?

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Our Man: In other words, to achieve this goal is equivalent to increasing the school starting age to 11. That’s ludicrous. But even more absurd is he idea that the teachers and teaching assistants who lose their jobs will have to then sit on the dole watching the children of this country go uneducated when [...]

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So we’re 60 years on from the start of the Korean War. The Glorious Glosters, General MacArthur and all. And, of course, the Turks: Red Chinese soldiers attacking a ridge line near Waewon last week were shocked to come face to face with swarthy, fiercely mustachioed Turks howling down upon them with bayonets fixed. In [...]

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At the ASI. Why we have financiers and why we probably need more of them.

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nef are up to their usual tricks. Their argument is, in reponse to the point being made about pensions, that we all need to work rather longer, is that everyone should work shorter hours. Eh?

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Renewable energy typically employs at least three times as many people per dollar invested as fossil fuels You continually trot out this point as if it’s a benefit. When, of course, jobs are a cost, not a benefit, of such plans. Get with reality can’t you? Having more people producing energy means that we have [...]

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The EPA regulations state that “milk typically contains a percentage of animal fat, which is a non-petroleum oil. Thus, containers storing milk are subject to the Oil Spill Prevention, Control and Countermeasure Program rule when they meet the applicability criteria …” Facepalm.

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Via Obo, this. Tom Harris MP meets the bureaucracy that he and his friends have spent the last few decades imposing upon us all. And he doesn’t like it, not one bit. The British civil service, eh? Makes you proud. Yes my luvver, that’s exactly why we don’t want our lives run by them: or [...]

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This is a nice little bit of, umm, well, I’m not quite sure what to call it. Reverse astro-turfing? Product placement? Argument from authority? Anyway, it’s a nice little bit. Ritchie has, as us devotees know, got himself a column at Forbes.com. As a U.K.-based accountant and economist Well, yes, ahem….. Now of course there [...]

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