Unions weren’t so uniformly behind tax increases when most of their members worked for companies in the private economy.

The corporate tax is a relic of the days before the Internet, the Euro and a capitalist China.

A teaching company gives the public what the academy no longer supplies: a curriculum in the monuments of human thought.

California governments at the state, county and city levels are facing the reality that the pension promises they made to their employees are unaffordable. Increasingly, governments are asking public employees to pay for a greater share of the cost of those promises. But those added payments are not enough, and so governments are tapping their general funds to make up the difference, at the expense of senior centers, pool... More

The communications revolution, customers carrying devices allowing them to communicate in multiple different ways—E-mail, texting, Facebook, Twitter, etc.—makes what once necessitated a phone call now unnecessary. Meanwhile the explosion of cell phones and other means of online calls—Skype, Gmail phone, etc.—means that those using phones are much less likely to use the landlines we've known... More

Economists have long assumed that private-sector consumers and producers act chiefly to promote their own self-interests. This assumption is both realistic and the foundation of much of the knowledge that economists since Adam Smith have contributed to public understanding. But when analyzing the public sector, economists naively assumed voters and government officials are motivated by concern for the general... More

The consequences of California's recent water wars have been particularly dire: rich farmland idled, workers laid off, and massive tax revenues forfeited. Worse still, they coincide with a $25 billion annual state deficit, an overtaxed and fleeing elite populace, unsustainable pension obligations for public employees, a growing population of illegal aliens—and a world food shortage. This insolvent state is in far too... More

America can learn alot from how other countries finance housing.

The number is 0.2%. It is the average annualized growth of US consumer spending over the past 14 quarters – calculated in inflation-adjusted terms from the first quarter of 2008 to the second quarter of 2011. Never before in the post-World War II era have American consumers been so weak for so long. This one number encapsulates much of what is wrong today in the US – and in the global economy.

Curbing for-profit colleges has been a goal of the Obama administration's department of education.But the department failed to take one crucial fact into account: This is the 21st century, and Web-based courses aren’t just a dodge employed by educational hustlers to lure masses of gullible students into cheap, shoddy programs of the kind that used to be advertised on matchbooks.

Back in 1992, when BMW announced it was building a plant in South Carolina, people wondered whether the state's workforce could produce these prestige vehicles.

A Bronx boom-and-bust story shows why the nation hasn’t yet recovered from the financial crisis.

Consumer sentiment, down 14 percent in August, is the lowest since 1980.

Do state 'millionaires' taxes prompt the rich, and other residents, to go elsewhere?

Though union leaders and their political supporters would seize on every upward market move to proclaim the end of the pension crisis, the current Wall Street upheaval should remind taxpayers that states and cities still need fundamental pension reform to lower the long-term risks for taxpayers and bring pension costs under control.

Even as an unsympathetic corporate defendant, Merck won the vast majority of cases that went to tria over Vioxxl, and another dozen or more that plaintiffs' attorneys dismissed on the eve of trial rather than risk the publicity of a certain loss.Yet the litigation still cost the company $7 billion.

It is no secret that we, in higher education, have grown a little flabby, a little too self-centered, a little too privileged. All colleges teach good business and management practices, yet they do not observe them.

Numerous studies from groups leaning left and right suggest that increasing numbers of children born out of wedlock, high divorce rates and looser family structures are contributing to rising poverty rates, especially among minorities and the under-educated. The result: an even greater drain on government resources.

A question for historians in the not-too-distant future.

The voters are deep in debt.

On August 15, 1971, President Nixon announced a freeze on wages and prices. This action paved the way for a series of monetary and fiscal policy interventions while Milton Friedman had been arguing for a 'steady as you go' approach.

The Small Business Administration (SBA) was created in 1953 to encourage lending to small businesses through government loan guarantees.The SBA will cost taxpayers about $6.2 billion in 2011.

Increasing the country's average growth rate by one percentage point over the next 20 years would not only result in much higher incomes and more jobs for all Americans but would also obviate the need for drastic spending cuts today to reign in the government deficit.

The ethanol industry will continue getting subsidies while gobbling up gargantuan quantities of corn, which, in turn, is increasing the cost of food at the grocery store at the very same time that huge numbers of Americans are unemployed and/or collecting food stamps.

“A tax on stupidity” is how a former colleague of mine (who typically opposed most forms of taxation) liked to describe, and justify, revenue raised by governments through lotteries. A somewhat similar type of taxation, but with a less offensive rationale (and name), are Pigovian taxes.

Ever since the 2008 collapse of the real-estate and financial bubbles, the government’s been using its credit card to stop bad companies (arguably including S&P itself) from paying the ultimate price for their failures in the run up to that crisis. Since he took office, Obama's strategy has been to double down on the nation's failed financial elite, from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to AIG to Bank of America. In a... More

Head for Camp David. Convene meetings. Take advice from economists, your Cabinet, all the experts. Then put forward a giant new economic program, maybe including some dramatic form of shock therapy that will calm financial markets and create jobs.

Thanks to the pension crisis, the public-sector should prepare for years of pay freezes in a giant  compensation correction.

In the new century, Los Angeles has begun to fade, and it can’t blame its sorry condition on the recent recession. The unemployment rate is one of the highest among the nation’s largest urban areas. Streets are potholed. Businesses and residents are fleeing. In virtually every category of urban success, from migration of educated workers to growth of airport travel, Los Angeles lags behind not only such fast-growth ... More

While the Obama administration’s push to regulate domestic greenhouse gas emissions has mostly stalled, the worldwide fight for carbon suppression continues. Consider an ambitious United Nations effort that, while not widely known in the U.S., has implications for developing world economic growth and for American taxpayers.

On average, regulations imposed by government at all levels account for 25 percent of the final price of a new single-family home built for sale.

In 2009, Congress extended jobless benefits to 99 weeks, the longest period in U.S. history. Those payments were meant to help unemployed workers get through a tough recession, while shoring up a faltering economy. Was it a wise approach? And with extended benefits expiring at year’s end, should compensation be prolonged again?

Something doesn't seem right in Central Falls. The city is dead broke and those they owe money to are lined up at City Hall to collect. But for some odd reason, the city’s bondholders have pushed ahead of all the others in line to claim full repayment of their debts; those later in line must settle for 50 cents on the dollar. Retired police officers and firemen will have their pensions cut by 50%.

Big environmental groups were for fracking before they were against it.

Early this past spring, the White House Council on Women and Girls released a much-anticipated report called Women in America. One of its conclusions struck a familiar note: today, as President Obama said in describing the document, “women still earn on average only about 75 cents for every dollar a man earns. That’s a huge discrepancy.” It’s also an exquisite example of the use of... More

Preliminary data “strongly suggest that the state of Texas could move towards making college more affordable by moderately increasing faculty emphasis on teaching. Looking only at the UT Austin campus, if the 80 percent of the faculty with the lowest teaching loads were to teach just half as much as the 20 percent with the highest loads, and if the savings were dedicated to tuition reduction, tuition could be cut by ... More

We have stared hard into the abyss of a national default, and the close call with financial Armageddon is starting to make a balanced-budget amendment look good.

Research shows obese more responsive to incentives than penalties.