The United States economy has changed significantly since the September 11 attacks, in a thoroughly unpleasant direction. While Gross Domestic Product has risen by 4.6 percent (in real terms) from the third quarter of 2001, government consumption has risen by 8.2 percent, while private fixed asset investment has declined. As always, disaster has tended to […]

It is an aphorism among both free market economists and many of the social democrat variety — into which latter camp “The Economist” surely now falls — that heavy immigration is economically beneficial. Yet when examined more closely, the benefits are suspect at best, and may well on balance prove to be negative.

Second quarter earnings season, now complete, demonstrated one thing: U.S. management’s ingenuity in using creative accounting to produce a deceptive earnings picture is unabated. Of all the threats to the U.S. economic system, this is the direst.

Second quarter gross domestic product growth figures, released Thursday, made the permabulls of Wall Street bellow with joy. Yet why should they? — for most of the growth was in government.