The Middle East’s future depends on the answer.

Bills that would restrict the way state and local governments tax businesses now have more momentum than they've enjoyed in the past, with lawmakers considering proposals to cap taxes on everything from cell phone service to rental cars to online transactions.

Three years ago this month, T. Boone Pickens launched a multi-million dollar crusade to bring more wind energy to the US.Those were halcyon times for the wind industry. These days, Pickens never talks about wind.

Unions and their allies have counterattacked against stories of rich public sector pensions by claiming that government pensions are actually quite modest. They argue, for instance, that the average annual pension of a state worker is under $30,000 in California and even less in New Jersey and New York. But their figures are misleading to say the least.

Over the last three decades, large cities like Pittsburgh, Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, and Toledo have seen their populations shrink,while areas like Houston, Atlanta, Dallas, Tampa, and Phoenix have seen their populations grow rapidly.

The president's recent statements suggest that he sees labor-saving technological innovation as a contributor to today's high rate of unemployment. That's unmitigated nonsense. Let's see whether technological innovation causes unemployment.

Although Amazon’s critics have identified a real problem, their solution is a mistake. They want an Amazon tax that replaces one type of unfairness with others, and imposes costs on the economy out of proportion with any revenue it might generate. There’s a better solution, although not one that proponents of the Amazon tax like.

Britain discovers that shrinking government is a lot harder than expanding it.

There are increasing signs of a backlash against the unprepared graduates that colleges are sending employers' way.

In microcosm, Central Falls' story is not so different from what's happening in Washington with the debt ceiling and fights over possible cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. It's fine to defend benefits and argue that any cuts are unfair. But even if taxes were raised on wealthier people (not likely anytime soon) and all corporate loopholes were closed (even less likely) I haven't seen credible research... More

Legislatures in red and blue states are enacting very different kinds of laws.

A great deal of government spending is hidden in the federal tax code in the form of deductions, credits, and other preferences — preferences that seem like they let taxpayers keep their own money, but are actually spending in disguise. Those preferences complicate the code and often needlessly distort the decisions of businesses and families. The magnitude of these preferences raises the possibility of a... More

A new report scores states on how well they administer the unpopular tax.

Will our leaders make the most of this moment, and set intelligent pro-growth priorities or will they succumb to narrow interests and pet projects? We can only hope, given 71,684 pages of unreadable prose known as the tax code.

Get ready for a huge sticker shock, followed by political shock, as the vast size of this potential debt – far more than any bond debt – hits home. It may mean that California's state and local governments are upside down, just like many homeowners.

In the long run, we will have to answer the broader question that the eurozone’s various debt crises have raised: Is the social value of making finance cheap worth the days of reckoning for stricken debtors?

For years, it's been an article of faith among advocates of renewables that increased use of wind energy can provide a cost-effective method of reducing carbon dioxide emissions. The reality: wind energy's carbon dioxide-cutting benefits are vastly overstated. Furthermore, if wind energy does help reduce carbon emissions, those reductions are too expensive to be used on any kind of scale.

The unemployment rate by itself is not the decisive factor in national elections. What seems to matter most is the overall direction of the economy during the election season and whether voters see things moving in the right or the wrong direction.

Why Tea Partiers won’t listen to the establishment, even as a debt crisis looms.

When 470 CEOs sign a letter to the President and Congress telling lawmakers to get their act together, it’s clear that business leaders are worried. The problem for the economy is that Washington’s paralysis is also paralyzing the business sector.

Trillion dollar legal questions on public pensions could bankrupt taxpayers.

The shale-gas (and shale-oil) revolution is the single most important development in the North American energy sector since the discovery of the East Texas Field in 1930. But you won’t get that story by reading the New York Times.

Social Security’s retirement age should not be increased for anyone on the verge of retirement, but there’s a good case for doing so over coming decades, as the Baby Boomers retire and the population ages.

Republicans should be careful about demanding too much in exchange for a debt limit increase. Yesterday morning, John Boehner said "this debt limit increase is [Obama's] problem." Politically, that's not likely to be true.

While President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner clash on deficit reduction, here’s a bit of bipartisanship you might have missed: Ultra-liberal Pete Stark and libertarian Ron Paul both want to kill Medicare’s new Independent Payment Advisory Board.

The U.S. Treasury currently collects enough each month in taxes and fees to meet its interest obligations. But not all expenditures are an equally high priority.

Infrastrucgure project promoters routinely overstate benefits and understate costs -- and not just a little bit.

Washington persists in postponing the bad-debt reckoning, strangling consumption and killing jobs.

The Great Recession of 2007–2009 may be distracting attention from a more fundamental troubling economic trend. The United States appears to be suffering from a long-term leak in job creation that pre-dates the recession and has the potential to persist for an unknown time. The heart of the problem is a pullback by newly created businesses, the economy’s most critical source of job creation, which are generating... More

Most U.S. state funds have asset allocation processes that are cumbersome, with money outsourced to numerous different managers; allocation decisions typically take between six and 18 months. Some funds are run by political appointees, rather than investment professionals. And even when asset managers are hired, salaries for most senior managers range between $100,000 to $200,000, much less than in the... More

When it comes to the fiscal health of public employee pension systems, “bending the curve” sums up what went down at the 2011 legislative sessions. Public employees gave ground, but -- with one notable exception -- that ground did not represent any major concessions.

While income inequality is the single biggest threat to social stability around the world, whether it is in the United States, the European periphery, or China, it is easy to forget that market forces, if allowed to play out, might eventually exert a stabilizing role. Simply put, the greater the premium for highly skilled workers, the greater the incentive to find ways to economize on employing their talents.

For almost two years, federal stimulus cash has kept New York City's economy going like gangbusters.

A realistic energy policy would require a constancy of a sort that rarely surfaces among the transients on Capitol Hill or in the White House. Given the very long lead times required to develop indigenous energy supplies, government decisions cannot cartwheel from side to side kowtowing to the fancy of the moment. Public opinion may argue for sudden shifts on nuclear power or offshore drilling; our continuing dependence on... More

The national media (as well as many policy experts) have focused on state budget battles, like the one in Wisconsin between Governor Scott Walker and public-employee unions. But the truth is that America’s problem with government-worker costs is disproportionately a local issue. In the typical city, town, or school district, compensation costs generally range from 70 to 80 percent of the budget. Those compensation costs... More

We did things right, did our homework, followed codes, got the proper inspections and opened for business in January 2010. Business has been steady — slow going at first but increasing, just as we had envisioned and planned before sinking every bit of equity we had into it. One thing we hadn’t planned on: a shakedown by the government whose rules we’ve... More

Retirement costs have been by far the largest driver of San Jose costs, skyrocketing from $73 million in 2001 to $245 million in 2011. As retirement costs escalated, we slashed services and reduced our workforce by 30 percent. We laid off cops and firefighters, and closed libraries and community centers. We cut total compensation by 10 percent for all employees. Next year, we are facing another huge budget shortfall that... More

Largely overlooked in the coverage of President Obama's latest press conference was his call for another round of deficit-fueled stimulus spending as part of a debt reduction package.If that sounds a bit incongruous, here's how Obama justifies it. "One of the most important things we can do for debt and deficit reduction is to grow the economy," he said, adding that "if there are steps that in the short term may reduce the... More

Whither the country's 27 million small businesses? Sales, payrolls and access to capital have bounced back (though not nearly to precrash levels), and the pace of companies filing for bankruptcy has slowed. Meanwhile, the regulatory burden remains heavy, and polls reveal that entrepreneurs (and their lenders) are growing skittish--a harbinger, perhaps, of more tough times ahead.

The latest study of the financial crisis, "Reckless Endangerment," shreds the narrative carefully constructed by Phil Angelides' Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were only bit players in the crisis and followed Wall Street into subprime lending.