A trade war brewing as a result of tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump could significantly hurt Indiana’s economy, particularly the steel, aluminum, soybean and corn sectors, according to Ball State economist Michael Hicks. In the policy statement, “Selected Tariff Effects on Indiana” (included at the end of this article), he estimates initial job losses…
Parenting is an important and sometimes overwhelming responsibility, especially for new parents. Just in Time Parenting is a free resource to help parents understand their children’s development by providing helpful information and tips. Just in Time Parenting is available from Purdue Extension through an educational partnership among the nation’s land-grant colleges. It focuses on providing parents with…
Across my travels in the Midwest, I’ve stumbled on a few places where civic-minded folks believe that the essential ingredient of community success is a positive outlook. In these places, I hear that an economic renaissance requires residents to embrace the many things that are healthy and good in their communities. Typically, this also means that…
MasterBrand Cabinets announced the sudden closure of its Auburn plant today, laying off 445 employees in a move it says reflects market conditions and a change in consumer tastes.
To be honest, it appalls me how many good meaning people misunderstand international trade. In normal times, it would not matter because the role of peaceful trade has been a largely settled intellectual consensus for close to a century. t is a background issue to most of our lives. Today, the consensus has vanished for…
Last month I attended a Federal Reserve Bank and Upjohn Institute conference on expanding opportunity within workforce development programs. It isn’t possible to review the breadth of the research or programs I heard about within the confines of this column, but I think many readers will appreciate one issue that raised its ugly head throughout…
Indiana is heading into the Memorial Day weekend tied with California for the largest gas price increase in the U.S. over the past year, driven in part by a fuel tax increase enacted by the state’s Republican-dominated Legislature.
In a recent column, I explained the willingness of taxpayers to spend more on local improvements and provided examples of my experience in Ohio. That argument was put to the test last week as Indiana communities considered a dozen school referenda. The sample of places couldn’t really have been a more diverse cross-section of Indiana….
Indiana’s forests and urban green infrastructure could look dramatically different over the next century due to warmer temperatures and changed precipitation patterns brought on by climate change, according to the latest two reports by the Purdue University-based Indiana Climate Change Impacts Assessment. The reports — Indiana’s Future Forests and Maintaining Indiana’s Green Spaces — were released during a…
I was recently hornswoggled into teaching a small class for my church, of course on economics. The organizers gave me wide latitude on the particulars. They asked simply that I talk about something I know a lot about. So, I ran a small focus group of my mom and my wife. They convinced me that…
