Recent Viewpoints

Kerby Anderson This last year of the pandemic and lockdown have put so many middle-class families in a position of financial fragility. A few years ago, the Federal Reserve Board conducted a survey of Americans. They found that nearly half (47%) of the respondents said that the only way they could cover an unexpected expense of $400 would be by borrowing or selling something. They could not come up with the money any other way. Five years ago, writing in…

Penna Dexter In a study of 10th and 12th graders conducted during peak Covid-19 school lockdown months, fewer respondents reported feeling depressed than in a study conducted two years earlier. The study’s lead author, academic psychologist Jean Twenge, says spending more time with their families was good for these teenagers’ mental health. The baseline for Gen-Z happiness is low. Their extensive social media use and often minimal in-person social interaction makes healthy family life crucial for them. Yet there are…

Kerby Anderson Three scientific discoveries point to the existence of God. Dr. Stephen Meyer makes that claim in his book, Return of the God Hypothesis. A week ago, he was on my radio program to make the case for God. Arguments for the existence of God were compelling but began to be challenged in the 19th century. For example, we had Darwin telling us where we came from. Marx, with a secular eschatology, was telling us where we are going….

Kerby Anderson If you pay people for not working, then people aren’t likely to go out and look for work. Most of us would think that is basic common sense. But apparently that eluded many in Congress except for a few US senators like Ben Sasse and Lindsey Graham. Months ago, they warned that providing high unemployment benefits to those out of work would create a disincentive. Two weeks ago, the April jobs report lamented that only 266,000 jobs were…

Kerby Anderson Yesterday, I talked about inflation and increasing prices. Economists can debate whether inflation is on the horizon, but all of us can see that many prices are rising. And those percentage increases are greater than the Consumer Price Index (CPI). Common sense and the ways we count our cents demonstrate that the CPI is not an adequate measure of inflation. Ten years ago, I wrote a commentary about the ways in which the government statistic varies from our…

Kerby Anderson Is inflation on the horizon? The chairman of the Federal Reserve (Jerome Powell) doesn’t think so. He concluded that, “Inflation is not a problem for this time as near as I can figure. Right now, M2 does not really have important implications.” What he is talking about is the M2 money supply, which measures cash, checks, money market, mutual funds, etc. If you type the words “M2 Money Stock” on a computer, you will see two things. First,…

Kerby Anderson I doubt that the CEOs of major corporations travel in the same circles as I travel. If they did, they would hear the phrase “get woke, go broke.” It appears that a majority of Americans have had enough from the woke corporate culture. But even if they don’t pay attention to what many of their consumers are saying to each other and on social media, you would think they would pay some attention to prominent political figures. Senator…

Penna Dexter There’s a proposal on the table to dramatically expand the government role in daycare.  President Biden says he wants to spend $225 billion on childcare on top of the programs that already exist. Do we really want America to be a society where the state assumes the care of young children? The spending is massive. Giving government this role in family life is unwise.  In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, investor and author J.D. Vance and Wheatley Institution…

Kerby Anderson Philip Yancey begins with an admission: “I am going through a personal crisis.” He explains that he used to love reading. In fact, he understands that “books help define who I am.” But that is his past, not his present. He has discovered that the Internet and social media have trained his brain “to read a paragraph or two, and then start looking around.” When he is reading an article online, pretty soon he is looking at the…

Kerby Anderson It was a grand experiment. Declare a “War on Poverty” and years later celebrate a victory. Unfortunately, poverty won the war. The percentage of people in poverty today is just slightly lower than the percentage in the 1960s when the war to end poverty began. People living in poverty now are doing better than decades ago, but we certainly have not eliminated poverty. Peter Cove has a bold vision. The title of his book is, “Poor No More:…

Kerby Anderson A study by the Manhattan Institute explains why it is so hard for middle-class families to make ends meet. The author, Oren Cass, distilled his research down in a Twitter post. “In 1984, the typical male worker could cover a family of four’s major expenditures (housing, health care, transportation, education) on 30 weeks salary. By 2018 it took 53 weeks. Which is a problem, there being only 52 weeks in a year.” Christopher Ingraham wrote about this in…