Our motto here at “The Freeman’s Journal” and “Hometown Oneonta” is “putting the community back into the newspaper.” Whether you read our hard-copy newspapers or subscribe to our website, AllOtsego.com, we believe it is important to not only cover the news of Otsego County, but also to provide a forum by which its residents can contribute their own views and expertise.…
Online home of The Freeman's Journal and Hometown Oneonta
Advertisement
Larry Malone - Page 2
The bottom line is this: Unless you radically change Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid, all of which would require legislative action and the signature of a president, there are only two real choices to reduce spending.…
One of my favorite non-fiction books is Carol Sheriff’s “The Artificial River.” Sheriff takes a unique look at the completion of the Erie Canal, 200 years ago on October 26, 1825. Instead of focusing on its engineering marvels—like most books about the canal—Sheriff shows how the canal changed the lives of Upstate New Yorkers.…
Most folks think you are wealthy if you have a lot of money. But having a ton of cash does not necessarily mean you are wealthy. That’s one of the bigger myths about how the economy works. To debunk it, we only need to revisit stories of individuals who die and leave behind loads of cash after appearing to be poor during their lifetimes.…
An earlier column this year asked “Where Did All of the Inflation Come From?” A big myth was busted when we discovered that the origins of recent inflation dated to Trump’s Tax Cut and Jobs Act, which injected $2.3 trillion into an economy with a 4 percent unemployment rate in 2019.…
So let’s test this claim with a close look at the last 50 years. We go all the way back to 1974, and the Presidential Administration of Gerald Ford. During the 50 years from then until now, Republicans occupied the Oval Office for 27 years, and Democrats for 23. The Republicans, and the total years of their presidencies were: Ford (3), Reagan (8), Bush I (4), Bush II (8), and Trump (4). The Democrats were Carter (4), Clinton (8), Obama…
Jobs are plentiful and workers are scarce, and not because people are sitting home living off of handouts from the government. At the end of my last column, I promised a solution to solving our worker shortage. The fix comes from a charged-up word we’ve heard on a daily basis for the past few years—immigration.…
The introduction of a minimum wage at the end of the Great Depression was largely a success, but the verdict in more recent times is more mixed. Let’s look at some of the key developments concerning today’s minimum wage.…
What exactly is this presumably very bad thing called the trade deficit? It’s the difference between the dollar value of imported items (coming into the U.S. from businesses operating in other countries) and exported items (departing the U.S. from businesses operating in our 50 states).…
Both Biden and Trump are trade protectionists, which means they are willing to put tariffs—taxes, essentially—on imported items. Tariffs make imported items more expensive, which is supposed to create more reasons to produce those things in the United States. Do tariffs produce such magic? To answer, it’s important to first understand how international trade works.…
