The historical evidence shows that shareholders usually greatly benefit from mergers.
Stephen Moore
We all, as individuals, can and should act compassionately and charitably. We can volunteer our time, energy, and dollars to help the underprivileged. We can feed the hungry, house the homeless. Most of us feel a moral and ethical responsibility to do so - to 'do unto others.'
Many small business owners want to pass their family legacy on to their kids and grandkids, but they are turned over to vulture funds because the family may be asset rich but lacks the cash to pay the estate taxes. I have met people who literally sold the farm to pay the taxes.
My father built a small business from scratch with years and years of sweat equity and many, many weeks away from home. He employed about 50 people, and by the end of his working years, the business was highly successful. He became a millionaire.
Ex-Im Bank doles out billions of dollars of loans and insurance subsidies every year and has become the poster child for corporate cronyism in Washington. Think of the bank as food stamps for America's Fortune 500 companies.
Donald Trump is producing the kind of shoot-the-moon economic recovery that we last saw under Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. He's copied a lot of the Reagan playbook: Deregulate, cut taxes, promote American energy.
The elimination of deductibility of state and local taxes will also encourage more privatization of municipal services.
Every dollar the government doesn't spend, tax, or borrow is a dollar that businesses and families can spend or invest themselves.
If the goal of the Trump tax cut is to make America look more like tax-cutting North Carolina and less like soak-the-rich Connecticut and Illinois, he's certainly on the right track.
For all the obsession in Washington and in college faculty lounges over income inequality, why isn't there more outrage over government policies that exacerbate the problem? There are hundreds of programs that make the poor poorer and increase poverty in America.
Nearly every policy during the Obama years was anti-growth: tax increases; minimum-wage hikes; ObamaCare; Dodd-Frank regulations; massive debt spending; the Paris climate change accord; an EPA assault against American energy; massive expansions of food-stamps programs and more.
Coal is tied to steel jobs, trucking jobs, and manufacturing jobs.
The trade deficit always goes up when the economy is strong and plummets when the economy sinks, as it did during both the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Great Recession of 2008-09.
The first iron rule of American politics is Follow the Money. This explains, oh, about 80 percent of what goes on in Washington.
Few nations have been as reliant on nuclear power as Korea. In many ways, cheap and reliable atomic energy helped make possible the 'miracle on the Han River' - i.e., the swift post-World War II economic surge of Korea.
I don't think anybody can reasonably say I am a sycophant for Trump, because I'm not.
I suspect the Left's obsession with raising tax rates is not about helping the poor or middle class or about lowering the budget deficit, but about tearing down the rich.
That is exactly what Mr. Trump is: The working man and woman's CEO.
The countries in the Paris climate accord have broken almost every promise they've made, and the nation (the U.S.) that hasn't signed the treaty is doing more than any other nation to reduce global warming.
Every dollar a foreigner spends over here directly subtracts a dollar from the trade deficit.
Borrowing isn't inherently bad; it depends a lot on what the debt is financing.
Venus Williams is a multi-millionaire not in spite of the fact that she is a woman, but precisely because she's a woman. She receives much higher pay than an equally skilled man. Isn't that precisely the opposite of what is meant by pay equity?
Stalin, Lenin, Marx, Mao, Pol Pot, Antifa, Castro, Che Guevara and the like use power to reduce the sanctity of the individual for the common good of the collective. It is a kind of enslavement that degrades the human spirit and makes us poorer over time.
The Affordable Care Act is a public-policy flop of epic proportions.
Stacks of job-killing Executive Orders and regulations from the Obama era need to be repealed or rolled back. At the top of the stack is the Clean Power Plan, which has put tens of thousands of American coal miners out of work.
Liberals complain that coal activity isn't a major producer of jobs because the industry is producing a lot more coal with a lot fewer workers. That is absolutely true. Ladies and gentlemen, that is called productivity.
The war on driving includes calls for carbon and gas taxes, tens of billions of gas tax money diverted to inefficient and little-used mass transit projects, and opposition to building new roads and highways.
A merit-based system will reward great public servants, and getting rid of the shirkers will improve morale and the pride of our federal workers. It will attract better workers to run our agencies.
Whereas Jimmy Carter had aggressively pursued anti-merger activity - the imbecilic case against AT&T was prosecuted under President Carter - Mr. Reagan understood the virtue of allowing companies to exploit the synergies of mergers to gain efficiency and lower costs.
Question: Why does anyone bother to listen to economists anymore? The profession has become an embarrassment, and the most respected economists have shown themselves to have as much predictive power as a deck of tarot cards.
The problem with tariffs is they shift higher costs onto the backs of non-protected industries and consumers.
A lifetime single worker really gets a horrid deal from Social Security. The return on average is less than 0.5 percent. These workers would be nearly better off stuffing their payroll tax dollars under a mattress.
Especially for the young and the lowest-skilled, minimum wage becomes a toll that prevents many from entering the work force and gaining the skills that can make a low income or middle class worker a high income worker. This is so obvious that one wonders why liberals keep championing the minimum wage cause.
Social Security is the greatest swindle of the poor ever.
The Obama administration and its allies, such as the Sierra Club, tried to kill coal because of their obsession with global warming.
The great American work ethic has not been lost, but it has been eroded by years of dumb government policies that Mr. Trump and Congress can correct.
In almost every case, whenever a tariff or quota is imposed on imports, that tax is strongly supported by the domestic industry getting the protective shield from lower-priced foreign competition. The sugar industry supports sugar tariffs; textile mills lobby for tariffs on foreign clothing.
The job market improved impressively under Barack Obama's presidency after the Great Recession, when millions of jobs vanished seemingly overnight.
Occupational licensing laws - in trades like moving companies, realtors, hair dressers, limousine services, beauticians, physical therapy, and on and on - stunt small business start ups, destroy jobs, and raise prices for lower-income consumers.
Many countries, even socialist Sweden and former communist Russia, have done away with their death taxes. They found the confiscation of wealth at death to be counterproductive.
Whenever there is an international crisis - an earthquake, a flood, a war - Americans provide more assistance than the people of any other nation.
Government can only spend a dollar to help someone when it forcibly takes a dollar from someone else.
At its core, government welfare is predicated on a false compassion.
No one has ever taken a serious stab at reducing fraud and cheating in Social Security, Medicare, food stamps, earned income tax credits, and so on. Trump will.
Government must become lean and efficient and customer friendly. It must begin to pay its bills. Liberals believe this is radical and cruel. The rest of us think it is common sense.
America was built on cheap and abundant coal.
Fossil fuels powered the U.S. into the industrial age and replaced windmills and wood burning, which were inefficient, as the primary sources of electricity.
The climate-change industrial complex pontificates that the U.S. has to stop using coal to save the planet. But even if the U.S. cut our own coal production to zero, China and India are building hundreds of coal plants. By suspending American coal production, we are merely transferring jobs out of the U.S.
The number of jobs created under President Barack Obama's stimulus turned out to be fewer than the number we would have had if the government had done nothing - according to the Obama administration's own analysis. So we got $9 trillion of debt with almost nothing to pay for it.
The big problem for atomic energy is that it can't compete on price with the new age of cheap shale gas and, to a lesser extent, clean coal.
