Acton Institute Powerblog Archives

Post Tagged 'Financial economics'

Why is the Episcopal Church Working as a Debt Collector?

For decades The Episcopal Church (ECUSA) has faced declining membership (in 1966, the ECUSA had 3,647,297 members; by 2013, the membership was 1,866,758, a decline of 49 percent.) But even when people are leaving the pews someone still has to pay for those pews, as well as the other overhead costs that come with running a large organization. Continue Reading...

Shareholder Activists: ‘We’re No Angels’ Edition

Shareholder activism, according to the headline in the most recent issue of PRWeek, is “rising” and “big companies [are] in crosshairs.” The ensuing article by Brittaney Kiefer, begins: Shareholder activism used to be just a nuisance that arose during proxy season, involving a group of contentious investors who tended to target smaller or less established companies. Continue Reading...

Is Student Loan Debt an Avoidable Crisis?

At the height of the housing crisis, it was estimated that 11 million homes in America were mortgaged for more than they were worth. That debt crisis may soon be dwarfed—if it hasn’t been already—by the student loan debt problem: With college enrollment growing, student debt has stretched to a record number of U.S. Continue Reading...

The Lottery as Aspirational Insurance

Whether the lottery is, as the old adage states, a tax on people who are bad at math, it is most certainly a tax on the poor. Those who have the least spend an inordinate percentage of their income every year on lottery tickets (estimates vary from 4-9%). Continue Reading...

The Economics of Contraception

One of the justifications for the HHS mandates (amended now to require insurance companies to provide contraceptives free of charge) has been purely economic. The idea is that the use of contraceptives saves insurance companies (and by extension the rest of us) money, as it is less expensive to pay for condoms or birth control pills than to pay for a pregnancy and birth. Continue Reading...