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Writing by John Tamny and Parkview contributors, from the latest commentary to the collected archive.
42 essays · Newest first
Clear filtersCato Institute co-founder Ed Crane has always said that freedom is the answer to any question about economic growth. If people are free they’ll have all the prosperity they could ever want. Crane’s…
It turns out back-scratching is a profession. And a well-paid one at that. So is sleeping, videogame playing, and college sorority consulting. As automation and globalization continue to lay waste to…
Social Security is in the process of morphing into “universal basic income” (UBI). The previous statement isn’t an endorsement of UBI, as much as it’s a prediction about what’s going to happen. Is…
“Another bad decision is that I didn’t move any of my money from a traditional 401(k) to a Roth 401(k). Neither did my husband. So we have to take more withdrawals than we need right now and pay…
“My husband and I were going to retire at 65, but the house we owned was too big and too expensive. We downsized to a co-op. Working longer helped, too, both financially and because I love what I…
Songwriter extraordinaire Burt Bacharach died in 2023 at the age of 94. In a recent New York Times interview of Herb Alpert, the musician extraordinaire looked back to 2021 when Bacharach called. He…
Trump’s assertion that “SENIORS SHOULD NOT PAY TAX ON SOCIAL SECURITY!” is more pro-growth than the 2017 Keynesian cuts foisted on him by Paul Ryan.
Markets privatized Social Security, let’s not force them to privatize yet another bad government idea.
Watch as tomorrow’s retirees are won over not with entitlements, but with political competition to reduce taxes on retirement withdrawals in concert with plans to delay the withdrawal age to well…
Fewer dollars will stretch much further in the future at the same time that the interaction of old people with retirement will change profoundly. More and more will choose work. This truth can…
Critics of Social Security, and there’s much to criticize, use the lack of a “lock box” or actual “trust fund” to make their emotional cases for the program’s looming insolvency, reduced benefits, or…
Free traders have long properly believed that the more people in countries are interconnected in an economic sense, the more that peace becomes likely given the immense cost of war.
It’s so easy to be pessimistic, but the pessimism ignores that the whole world becomes more and more safe from socialism, communism and other ideologies as savings and investment grow.
Increasingly work is joy, and a reflection of unique intelligence. People are saving less because they don’t in any way regard 65 as the endpoint of work.
Retirement is vanishing before our eyes. Probably in the lifetimes of our children it will take on dated, past tense connotations like the telephone booth. One can only hope. People are happier when…
The surest sign of a booming economy is falling prices, and the marriage of man with thinking/doing machines is set to bring on the cheapest of “Cheap Revolutions.” Retirees will live grandly, and at…
Uncertainty about Social Security’s future is more of a political discussion than it is a discussion of actual market realities.
Ian Ayres and Quinn Curtis are law professors at Yale and UVA. Their area of expertise is retirement, and as they see it, the typical employee paying into retirement funds must be saved from himself.…
