Recent Articles from Tom Binnings
Challenges Ahead: Economic Concerns and Inflation Spell Trouble for 2024 Elections
President Biden’s re-election prospects face serious challenges. Despite public approval for many of his initiatives and strong disdain for former President Trump’s and his most ardent supporters’ behaviors, polls increasingly show Biden losing enough swing states to shift the electoral college in Trump’s favor. A myriad of factors will determine the outcome of the election, […]
Colorado Cities Soar in Milken Institute’s Best Performing Cities Report 2023
The Milken Institute, a global non-partisan think-tank, has provided its index-based Best Performing Cities report since 1999. The index is created by ranking 400 American cities across three categories: access to economic opportunity, labor markets and the impact of high-tech industries. The index gives a good assessment of community-level economic vitality. While job growth is […]
The Economics of Homelessness: A Potential Win-Win-Win-Win
The most fulfilling job I ever had was working for a mental health agency developing housing and job opportunities for its clientele. Many of the clients were, or had been, homeless and my team was tasked with providing them with a bridge to recovery, which meant being housed and largely self-sufficient in an environment with […]
The Economics of Housing Inflation in Colorado: Exploring the Supply and Demand Imbalance
The lack of affordable housing in Colorado for middle and lower-income households is a lesson in economics. Unlike the healthcare market, which is muddled with third-party payors, the housing market is straightforward supply and demand analysis. Demand has been far outpacing the supply of housing for the last decade in both the ownership and rental […]
Financial Forecasting the for the Future of 2023 With Economics and Tarot
This time of year, economists are invited to podiums to offer their prognostications for the coming year. Sometimes it’s a perverse holiday ritual. Not wanting to stuff stockings with coal for the holidays, we tend to look for optimism even if we’ve spotted the Grinch. My favorite retired economist and predecessor with this column, Tucker […]
Voting With Our Feet
The world of community economics includes Charles Tiebout’s 1956 theory suggesting people “vote” on private products with their pocketbooks and vote on government services with their feet. If you do not like what you are getting from the government, move to a different jurisdiction. Twenty years later, Albert Hirschman introduced us to “voice versus exit.” […]
The Economics of Exploitation
There is a dichotomy within my ancestral families. My mother’s side has ties to slave ownership while on my father’s side we find post-Civil War carpetbaggers. Contemplating these disparate realities, I see a common thread—human exploitation of one type or another. In the case of slavery, the exploitation is obvious. With carpetbaggers it’s more subtle. […]
The Need for Supply-Side Economics
One of the memorable presidential political quips for me was candidate George H. W. Bush labeling Ronald Reagan’s supply side economic campaign as “Voodoo Economics” trying to develop economic policy based on magic. This was in 1980 as the U.S. and European economies were trying to break free of stagnation and high inflation that dominated […]
A lesson in broadband economics
Faster connectivity and real-time data flows will dominate the 21st century. The societal transformation will be radical, as major improvements in transportation and communications effectively reduce time and distance in the economy, thereby increasing the output of any one person on a given day.
The transformation of public libraries
The prospect of systemic failure is disconcerting since the pursuit of societal opportunities at every level increasingly relies on online access to information from “safe and trusted” entities. This is a key economic reason to support our libraries.
Economic lessons learned at halftime of this pandemic
From the collaboration between governments, the private sector and scientists and the development of vaccines, to small business woes and projected recovery time, this column delves into what we've learned over the last year. The most important lesson learned was about true leadership.
‘This, too, will pass,’ but we must be more rational
As an economist, Tom Binning's hopes we can stay focused on effectively addressing the compelling trends on the horizon in a more rational manner rather than being sucked into the whirlwind of emotion that remains the ultimate risk to all societies, and especially democracies.