by Jason Arp Government-run economic development entities are having a difficult time replicating the real thing. News stories from around Indiana point to problems related to creating what I call synthetic economies: The Muncie building commissioner is charged with wire fraud, theft and money-laundering; a Marion tax district lost $2.5 million on a failed hotel project; Crawfordsville and Montgomery County defunded their economic development corporations; the Angola Herald-Republican filed a public access complaint against the Steuben…

IF YOU ARE AMONG THOSE struggling with a definition of “fake” news, we have an illustration (below). It is from page 4A of the Monday issue of the Gannett corporate national publication known locally as the Indianapolis Star. You can see that the page has three items on it: a news article and two advertisements. One of the advertisements, with only a small-print disclaimer, is laid out to look like a news article, complete with a…

Barack Obama: America’s Anti-American President — Governance and Security Implications John F. Gaski, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Mendoza College of Business University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, IN 46556 574-631-5266 jgaski@nd.edu The author is a long-time registered Democrat―and a long-time registered Republican― intermittently, not sequentially, which should dispatch any possible impression of partisanship. Dr. Gaski’s primary research field is the study of social and political power and conflict. Abstract This analytical item revisits some public matters…

John McCain, the anti-Trump, tells us he knows how to spot a dictator. He will be the one trying to suppress a free press. But Senator McCain was wrong about the effective range of North Vietnamese AAA fire and he is wrong about this. For starters let us assume that, by “suppressing,” McCain does not mean challenging the factual content of news reports. That would be ridiculous. Let us assume he is referring to journalism…

by Maryann O. Keating, Ph.D. In the civics section of the 2014 National Assessment of Educational Progress, eighth graders were tested on this question: “Which of the following is a belief shared by most people of the United States?” The country should have a single political party. The country should have an official religion. The government should be a democracy. The government should guarantee everybody a job. Thirty-two percent correctly chose “3”; however, 51 percent…

Not for publication. For the use of the membership only. by Eric Schansberg, Ph.D. The downtown of Louisville across the river is now a food “desert” in that it has few significant grocery stores. Last year, four prominent groceries closed there and a proposed WalMart was sacked by legal hurdles and social hassles. Grocery stores in urban centers throughout the nation face difficult economic challenges. Ironically, these include efforts to help the poor — e.g.,…

by Fred McCartney The people in this city who decided on the Palladium-to-Stadium bus route (otherwise known as the Red Line) are determined to go ahead with that plan, even though it obviously means further delay in the needed expansion of city-wide bus service to those who would use it and truly need it. While print media publishes articles and letters about how dire the city’s needs are for general public transportation — many with…

by Maryann O. Keating, Ph.D. There was much soul searching at the annual meetings of the American Economic Association held in Chicago last month. Four ex-chairs of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors, two Democrats and two Republicans, commented in a panel discussion on economic issues facing President Donald Trump. His proposed trade policies concerned the several hundred economics professors in the audience, all generally committed to teaching their students the economic benefits of unrestricted…

by DAVID LANTZ The author is an adjunct instructor for economics at Indiana Wesleyan University. This was written as part of the American Enterprise Institute’s “Values and Capitalism” project. (Dec 30) — The Oxford Dictionary has declared as its 2016 Word of the Year: Post-Truth, defined as: “Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief. “1 I suggest that the…

“The impossible often has a kind of integrity which the merely improbable lacks.” — Doug Adams, author of “The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy” IT IS STRANGE POLITICAL WEATHER when the Democrat plan makes more sense than the Republican one. The reason is not an ideological flip. It is that ideology has died — on the Republican side, at least. Democrats, we have learned through painful experience, mean what they say, that is, adherence to…