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Manufacturing Jobs Are Real and a Path to a Brighter Future

Recently, Lynnda and I attended the Christmas Luncheon at the West Virginia Radio and TV Museum and Hall of Fame at Huntington. One of the presenters mentioned, “One of my claims to fame is, I was there and saw Chuck Yeager (the first man to break the sound barrier) fly his jet under the Southside Bridge in Charleston.” I have heard the story of Chuck Yeager flying his jet under the Southside Bridge over the Kanawha River in Charleston. It always sounded like folklore or a legend to me. Yeager confirmed in an interview, he flew an Airforce P-80 Shooting Star jet under Charleston’s ...

Age Is Nothing But A Number In Fulfilling Dreams

Let me share an event that was less than 5 minutes, that keeps coming up in my memory. In 1979, I was blessed to be hired to work for the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, Ohio. I was tasked to be an Internal Auditor for the bank, and part of my responsibilities was to do what I called surprise audits with a team of auditors on banks in the 4th district. As part of my new job we were sent to Atlanta, Georgia to go to the Federal Auditors School for a series of classes. As we took the class, we were living out of a hotel. One day after work, we got on the hotel elevator, and to my ...

Tucker Carlson, Chuck Schumer And Free Speech

Last week, Sen. Charles Schumer, the leader of the Democrats in the United States Senate, introduced a resolution on behalf of himself and 40 other Senate Democrats that, if passed, would record the sense of the Senate as condemning the media superstar Tucker Carlson because of the political, historical and cultural opinions of a guest on Carlson’s podcast. You read that correctly: The U.S. Senate is being asked to condemn Carlson because of what someone else said. Here is the back story. When James Madison was crafting the iconic language of the First Amendment -- “Congress ...

Flattening Ideologies Dumbest Assumption In Politics

One of the most persistent mistakes in modern politics is the insistence on flattening all ideologies -- pretending that all human beings think the same way, want the same things, and are motivated by the same forces. Every time policymakers fall into this trap, the result is not compassion or clarity but some of the worst public policy imaginable. The assumption usually begins with a comforting but false premise: that all people harbor the same yearning for freedom in precisely the same way. That belief animated much of the George W. Bush administration’s foreign policy, when the ...

The sad reasons behind why Johnny can’t read

Reading and math scores are abysmal across the country, as national testing results keep documenting. Illiteracy rates are rising: The number of 16- to 24-year-olds reading at the lowest literacy levels increased from 16% in 2017 to 25% in 2023, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics. In some inner-city schools, less than half of kids are reading or doing math at grade-level proficiency. Many high school grads can’t read their diplomas. As an economist, I would submit that this is our greatest crisis. It puts the future of American prosperity in grave ...

The shameful conspiracy theories spread by Candace Owens

Few would have guessed that Erika Kirk would have to spend energy these last few, heart-breaking months fending off a right-wing influencer bent on implicating her slain husband’s own organization, TPUSA, in his assassination. Here we are, though. Influential voices on the right have become more and more conspiratorial in recent years, and now, the paranoia is being wielded against its own. In the aftermath of the Kirk assassination, the talk was of an energized MAGA movement picking up his baton. Instead, TPUSA has been slandered nearly every single day by one of the loudest ...