I don’t recall the first time I heard that Fee-for-Service (FFS) was bad. As an entrepreneur, FFS seemed to be a perfect description of a traded value-for-value transaction between a business and its customers. Fee-For-Service (or Fee-For-Product), to most business owners and customers, describes paying for exactly what you receive. A transparent price is set...
Most of the past forty-eight hours have been spent either in, or en route to and from, the Midland-Odessa region. Far out in west Texas’s Permian Basin, the two cities — towns, really — have a relationship that I still can’t quite unpack. On my last visit, which turned out to be the first time...
The U.S. Department of Labor’s latest report shows inflation raging, with consumer prices rising 7.0% in 2021. At that pace, prices will double in roughly a decade. In only a year, President Biden’s Federal Reserve (Fed) has presided over a four-fold increase in inflation. Despite price stability being the Fed’s duty, its Chairman, Jerome Powell,...
America’s elite institutions of higher education have long remained the home of “woke” ideologies and divisive concepts which most Americans would rebuff. For this tiny fraction of those teaching and being educated at our nation’s elite colleges, the prevailing factors used to describe any type of racial disparities, whether it be in health care, education,...
Twenty-one states rung in the New Year by raising their minimum wage, to as high as $15 per hour in California, thinking it will benefit employees in those states. But the minimum wage does the opposite of helping workers, especially for those who need it. Fortunately, 20 states, including Texas, haven’t raised theirs in more...
Slavery is alive and well today all across the world, and it comes in the form of human trafficking. January is National Human Trafficking Awareness Month. Human trafficking is today’s form of slavery as men, women, and children are recruited and exploited by being forced into labor against their will. There are many forms of...
Since the darkest days of the COVID-19 pandemic, 17 states started or extended school choice programs. Sadly, Texas is not one of them. While the Lone Star State is one of the country’s economically freest, it lags others in important areas, including parental control over children’s education. That must change. The 2023 legislative session presents...
Some things are so unreliable that we have come to rely on their unreliability. Sound confusing? Just look at Washington, D.C. Does anyone really count on the promises or warnings that politicians espouse from the Capitol? No—you count on those promises being broken. Student loan borrowers have been warned for months by the U.S. Department...
Consumers have been shocked and dismayed over the last year with the dizzying and destructive rise of food prices. Meat prices in particular have gone sky-high. In November, beef prices were up over 20%, bacon was up 21%, and pork ribs were up 23% for the year. Some of that increase is due to inflation,...
December’s jobs report was again below expectations, with just 199,000 nonfarm jobs added last month. Also disappointing was the fact that wages are rising slower than inflation. The unemployment rate fell 0.3 percentage points to 3.9%, and the labor force participation rate was unchanged at 61.9%. The number of unemployed fell 483,000 to 6.3 million....
Consider Sinaloa. If you don’t know Sinaloa, you ought to know it is physically beautiful and possesses a rich local culture. It is also a historic and current epicenter of cartel activity: the homeland of the infamous “El Chapo.” He is now a permanent guest of the United States government at a maximum-security prison in Florence, Colorado,...
Just when you thought you’d seen it all, a new study out of Denmark ludicrously claims fossil fuels may be to blame for declining fertility around the world. While environmentalists used to warn of overpopulation decimating the planet (remember “The Population Bomb”?), researchers are now beginning to show concern that there will soon be too...