Why are Cubans so poor? They’ve done very well in the U.S., where emigres from the perpetually recessed country have risen to the top in sports, business and politics. Yet in their own country Cubans are desperately impoverished.

Marcus Ryu is co-founder and chief executive of Guidewire Software, a Foster City, CA company that is valued at over $6 billion on the New York Stock Exchange. And while he’s a very rich man, it may surprise some that he’s a ferocious opponent of tax cuts.

December 31st will mark the final day of the National Football League’s (NFL) 2017 regular season. And while January 1st will be all about college football’s most prominent bowl games, readers can rest assured that news of head coaches being fired will soon re-enter the sports discussion. It always does.

When the 21st century began Apple was just a few years removed from near bankruptcy, Microsoft, after a few wasted years fighting off a Department of Justice eager to neuter it, was on the verge of a fifteen-year span during which its share price almost literally stood still, Google was a small private company reliant on word of mouth about its nascent search engine, Amazon was a peddler of books, CDs, VHS videos and DVDs (its shares were soon to plummet into the $1 range), and Facebook didn’t even exist. Founder Mark Zuckerberg was still in high school.

As is well-known now, President Trump is conducting a search for the next Federal Reserve Chairman. Naturally this has economists all riled up simply because the Fed employs more of the credentialed than any other entity in the world.

USA Today recently reported on a social media user disturbed that she’d been “bombarded by political ads on Facebook attacking Planned Parenthood and the Affordable Care Act.” Apparently Valerie Robinson feels she should have “more transparency” about what ads enter her Facebook news feed, plus she desires “more due diligence and more care with what’s being disseminated to the public” by the Silicon Valley giant.

U.S. federal debt added up to $908 billion in 1980, but today, nearly 40 years later, the number comes in around $20 trillion. That the amount owed by U.S. taxpayers has soared over twenty-fold would, in a static world, correlate with a huge increase in borrowing costs for the U.S. Treasury.

The British fought three wars in Afghanistan over an 80-year period. They finally left this “graveyard for empires” in 1919, only to eventually be replaced by the Soviet Union in the late 70s, and the U.S. in the aftermath of 9/11.

Modern stock-market commentary is always amusing. Maybe it’s the desire among writers to secure clicks in the age of the internet, but so much of the media chatter about markets focuses on the coming “boom,” “crash,” or the always “eerie” similarities to 1929, 1987, or 2008. That it does is a sign of how worthless most equity commentary is.

The saying, "It's the thought that counts," is a lame excuse when it comes to bad gifts and an even worse way to justify public policy. Lawmakers and bureaucrats continuously impose new regulations that often sound good. Yet policymakers too often fail to consider obvious economic ripple-effects, many of which hit hard-working Americans like tsunamis. There is no better example than occupational licensing standards, such as the District of Columbia's new requirement that all childcare workers obtain a four-year degree.