Peter Schiff answers a student’s question about the gold standard. The student approached Peter Schiff after the event to debate him.
FreedomWorks and the Reason Foundation hosted Peter Schiff to give a rebuttal to Ben Bernanke’s lectures at George Washington University. A handful of undergraduate students who sat through Bernanke’s four lectures showed up at the event including the guy asking the question.
I filmed this so sorry for any shaky hands!
Check out my new op-ed in the Daily Caller:
The Federal Reserve’s Public Relations Campaign is Doomed to Fail
http://dailycaller.com/2012/03/30/the-federal-reserves-public-relations-campaign-is-doomed-to-fail/
Also, I created a page on Facebook: http://facebook.com/JulieBorowski
Women are paid less than men because of individual choices not employer discrimination.
New video!
If you woke up today feeling miserable, you’re not alone. As someone who is sensitive to jet lag and time changes, I’ve always dreaded Daylight Saving Time. Enough to write a blog post ranting about it. I woke up this morning cursing the government for making me feel terrible. Someone commented that I blame the government too much. No, no, no. Other people don’t blame the government enough.
Government needs to stop screwing around with time. It is bad for your health, doesn’t save energy, cost a lot of money and is totally unnecessary.
Daylight Saving Time is bad for your health:
Monday morning risks can be more serious than needing to nap at your desk :researchers at Loyola University School of Medicine report that there are more workplace injuries and traffic accidents the day after we turn our clocks ahead. Heart attack rates increase by as much as 10%. The time change is hardest on those who are chronically sleep deprived: the National Sleep Foundation estimates that more than one-third of Americans are dangerously sleepy.
(h/t United Liberty)
In recent years several studies have suggested that daylight saving time doesn’t actually save energy—and might even result in a net loss.
Environmental economist Hendrik Wolff, of the University of Washington, co-authored a paper that studied Australian power-use data when parts of the country extended daylight saving time for the 2000 Sydney Olympics and others did not. The researchers found that the practice reduced lighting and electricity consumption in the evening but increased energy use in the now dark mornings—wiping out the evening gains.
It may actually waste more energy. Indiana started observing Daylight Saving Time in 2005. Hoosiers now pay more on their electric bills than they did before the switch. Why?
That’s because the extra hour that daylight saving time adds in the evening is a hotter hour. “So if people get home an hour earlier in a warmer house, they turn on their air conditioning,” the University of Washington’s Wolff said.
Oh, and it cost a lot of money:
One economist has estimated the cost of shifting that hour forward due to daylight saving time is $1.7 billion dollars a year. That represents just under $3 per American in lost productivity due to clock resetting.
It’s confusing. People miss appointments. Plus it’s bad for business.
Critics, including those behind the online petition at End Daylight Saving Time, say the time shifting causes more problems than it’s worth by making it exceedingly difficult for businesses to coordinate timetables with markets in Asia and Africa and Europe.
Robert Murphy, adjunct scholar of the Mises Institute, helps prove my point. His Facebook status: “had totally forgotten about Daylight Savings until I noticed my microwave, cell phone, and laptop having a dispute.”
It’s unnecessary. What’s the point anyway?
The name is dumb too. The government cannot “save” any daylight. We have exactly the same amount of daylight as we did before.
Arizona doesn’t observe Daylight Saving Time. There’s a Navajo saying about it.
The government is responsible for my sleep deprivation and any typos in this post.
Transcript of my YouTube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X–fBS4Gqn8
Hi everyone. So I just watched the Kony 2012 YouTube video. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a video put out by the non-profit Invisible Children about Joseph Kony. Kony is this evil man in Uganda who is responsible for the deaths of thousands and thousands of children.
Here’s what I find interesting. Some of the donations to Invisible Children go to the government of Uganda. Both the Uganda government and Invisible Children are lobbying for more foreign military intervention to capture Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army. President Obama has already sent 100 combat ready troops to Uganda back in October but they have had no luck.
Joseph Kony is a bad person. I am disgusted by him. That’s not the argument here. I am completely opposed to U.S. military action in Uganda and here’s why.
It is not as simple as he laid out in the video. If history is any indication, U.S. government intervention will make the situation even worse. Good intentions does not equal good results.
If you want to go and help the people of Uganda, by all means. More power to you. But we need to bring our home troops rather than insert them into more messy, internal conflicts.
Kony disgusts me. But I am opposed to sending U.S. troops to Uganda. It is unconstitutional, not in our national security interest and will lead to messy unintended consequences
My new video on nullifying the NDAA.
Originally posted at FreedomWorks.org.
Americans are feeling the pain at the gas pump. Gasoline prices have soared 42 cents a gallon since the beginning of the year. The nationwide average is now $3.74 a gallon, a 101 percent increase from January 2009. So who’s to blame?
To be fair, multiple factors are responsible for the rising gas prices. But the bulk of the blame should be placed on the Federal Reserve. Quite simply, gas prices are rising because the purchasing power of the dollar is rapidly falling. Oil is priced in U.S. dollars which means that its price goes up when the value of the dollar goes down. The purchasing power of the dollar has significantly dropped since the Federal Reserve has printed trillions and trillions of new dollars in recent years. Whenever more dollars are pumped into the economy, the value of the dollar falls.
Look at it this way. One dollar could buy you a gallon of gas in 1989. I’m sure we all would like to go back to when gas was 98 cents a gallon. It costs us almost four times as much to buy the same amount of gas today. The price of gas has risen by 382 percent in just 23 years. The dollar can’t buy what it used to because the Fed has its printing presses working overtime.
The graph below shows the correlation between the value of the dollar and the price of oil:
As you can see, the price of oil has gone up as the dollar has fallen. We can see how the Federal Reserve’s actions have driven up the price of gas. The Fed’s multiple quantitative easing plans have only destroyed the value of the dollar. The term quantitative easing in layman’s terms just means that the Fed will print more money out of thin air.
The graph below shows how the Fed’s policies have affected gas prices:
West Chester University Economics Professor Eric Parnell explains the graph:
Gasoline prices have followed a predictable trend since the first days of Fed stimulus. During QE1, gasoline prices skyrocketed by +118%. Once QE1 ended in April 2010, gasoline prices immediately dropped by -27% in a matter of months, and this occurred during what is typically the strong summer driving season. Once QE2 was delivered to the market in August 2010, gasoline prices jumped another 92% by the end of this stimulus program in June 2011. Once again, the moment QE2 ended, gasoline prices retreated another -28% in a matter of months. Finally, since the latest Fed stimulus program along with the European Central Bank’s own LTRO program, we’ve seen gasoline prices skyrocket another +30%. What is even more irksome is that much of this rise in gasoline prices has occurred during a time when gasoline consumption has been falling. Have the laws of supply and demand been repealed? No, they’ve just been severely distorted by policy action.
The Federal Reserve may not be solely responsible for rising gas prices. But we should not ignore the fact that the central bank routinely devalues our currency which in turn increases the price for goods and services. As a National Review headline reads, “Gas Price Spike: It’s the Monetary Policy, Stupid.“
