Harrisburg had a long love affair with borrowed money, using it to spur projects of dubious value.

Gov. Jerry Brown, who was elected with critical union support last year,  used the word "unsustainable"  to describe the pension dilemma that California faces. Only Brown, who loves political chess, knows for certain whether pension reform is something he's willing to go to the mat to accomplish, or just a sacrificial political pawn.

Forty years from now, politicians, writers and historians may struggle to understand how the US, once the quintessential middle-class society, became as socially stratified as Europe or even Brazil. Should that dark scenario come to pass, they would do well to turn their attention first to New York City and New York State, which have been in the vanguard of middle-class decline.

Venture capitalists and entrepreneurs set their sights on clean energy as the Next Big Thing. In the meantime, however, a real revolution has happened in traditional energy -- one that poses a serious challenge to companies and investors betting on alternative energy. This breakthrough is arguably one of the greatest advances in energy production since the 1960s. And it came not from a Silicon Valley company, or from MIT or... More

Under Obamacare, firms with more than 49 workers have to offer affordable health insurance coverage to full-time employees or pay a penalty. But the coverage only has to be for an individual policy, not a family policy. And what most people don't know is that if a worker receives coverage for a single person from his employer, his family will not be able to get subsidized health insurance coverage ... More

California claims many proud “firsts” – first Disney theme park, first motion picture studios, first state governed by Arnold Schwarzenegger. Soon it will add: first state to commit fiscal suicide by imposing cap-and-trade regulations. No wonder poppies are California’s state flower.

Named after Paul Volcker, the Volker Rule adopted a suggestion made by the former Fed chairman: Banks that benefit from taxpayer guarantees of their deposits should not be in the business of speculative trading. The rule was to be, in the president's words, "a simple and common-sense reform." The Volcker Rule sounded nice. But it had nothing to do with the financial crisis.

State-sponsored lawsuits are trial bar's latest cash cow.

Here is a very brief summary of the way that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are continuing to bail out mortgage investors through their guarantee programs.

What people often don’t realize is that the media framing of scientific studies incorporates the journalist’s own perspective, whether the journalist realizes it or not. A dramatic example is the recent appearance of dueling studies on fracking that provide a natural experiment on media sensationalism.

President Obama capped the first year of his presidency by deriding Wall Street bankers lapping up obscene bonuses, only to say later that he doesn’t “begrudge” the multimillion-dollar payouts. He tried to hit the reset button with business after the 2010 midterm elections, plucking a new chief of staff from the banking industry, summoning 20 CEOs to a five-hour makeup session and telling the Chamber of... More

If current trends held, the Ocean State would soon look like Athens on the Narragansett: undersized and overextended. Its economy would wither. Jobs would vanish. The state would be hollowed out.

In a budget nearing $4 trillion a year, it strains credulity to hear members of the deficit supercommittee say they’re still no closer to finding $1.2 trillion in savings over the next decade.

Don't believe the hype. Educated women are still the marrying kind because they know intuitively what research concludes: children are more likely to succeed in school, go to college, and get good jobs if they grow up with their two married parents. Prepping your kids for a competitive knowledge economy is a time-consuming, devotional task; no wonder it works better with a steady, focused twosome.

The protesters' environmental campaign directly contradicts another of their stated goals: jobs. They appear to be unaware that inexpensive energy, which they deride, gives America the possibility of creating the jobs demonstrators reportedly desire.

Republicans candidates just squared off in a two-hour debate in Las Vegas — a city where home prices have dropped a national high of 59 percent during the past five years — with almost no time spent discussing America’s housing depression.

Montana Governor Schweitzer said that he believes the key to sound and effective government is good fiscal management. This means being fiscally conservative when it comes to the state’s budgetary spending, which enables him to be socially progressive on key issues like education and health care.

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Advertising censors insist children need to be protected from the food industry because parents aren’t up to the task.

There are three reasons why hydrocarbons will continue to dominate the global energy mix for decades to come: cost, the slow pace of energy transitions, and scale.

If the private sector cannot be trusted to set the terms and conditions for collateralized loans made to high income households, it’s not much of a leap to suspect that we are headed to the full socialization of credit risk.

The Wall Street protesters blame Big Business for our economic problems. But Niall Ferguson claims they should direct their fury at the profligate spending of the baby boomers.

Is your 401(k) and IRA safe from the tax man? That's a question that might be worth asking, as the congressional "supercommittee" scrambles to find $1.5 trillion in additional deficit cuts.

Mocking the protestors in New York is easy; but here at home, the problem of crony capitalism is in fact eating away at our civic entrails. Leftists willing to grapple with this malignancy should be welcomed, if only for the potential seriousness of their efforts.

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What do they want, and what do they need? That’s the question about the protesters who now occupy Wall Street, Washington and just about everywhere else. Theirs is what might be called a Rolling Stones situation: They can’t always get what they want, but if somebody tries, some time, they may get what they need.

Want to renew your driver’s license, go to a state park, or sue someone in civil court? Chances are you’ll pay higher fees for those and other government services than you would have just a few years ago. Raising fees — instead of taxes — is one budget tactic many states have used to weather the weak economy.

One of the major complaints of the Occupy Wall Street crowd, many of whom have taken on significant student debt, is that the cost of college is too darn high. And they're right, but not because of greedy corporate fat cats. No, the real guilty party here is federal politicians.

A focus on utopian ends instead of concrete policies prevents OWS from following a  Tea Party lesson: take your fight to the ballot box.

The nation's two largest pension funds, the California Public Employees' Retirement System and the California State Teachers' Retirement System, have been plagued by myriad fiscal problems and even a corruption scandal in the case of CalPERS, and yet these systems continue to lecture the private sector on ethical corporate governance. The latest nonsense, released recently, is a project funded by the two systems to promote... More

The United States wasn't born with a comparative advantage in biotechnology. The world's "pharmacy" started in Europe in the 19th century and was dominated by firms in Germany, France and Switzerland for most of the 20th century. But starting in the 1970s and 1980s, American policymakers embraced a number of pro-innovation policies that helped create the world's most attractive investment climate for... More

Long-term unemployment is becoming the defining feature of the Great Recession.

From 1997 to 2007, New York City's tax collections nearly doubled, from $20.4 billion to $38.6 billion, growth nearly three times the inflation rate. Why? The financial industry was making record profits from debt and derivatives. Yet even during these “good” years, New York could barely keep its head above water.  It’s pretty clear that banks and investment firms won’t enjoy the growth... More

Amid a convergence of bad economic news, leading California Democrats have begun to entertain the notion that the state might need a more business-friendly environment.

Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid’s plan to fund a $445 billion stimulus, err, jobs bill with a 5.6 percent surtax on millionaires is not all bad. After all, Tax the Rich does make a nice campaign bumper-sticker. But it is mostly bad. Why? Here are five reasons.

Having finally laid to rest speculation about a presidential run, Chris Christie can return to reforming his state. More than a decade of fiscal mismanagement has left Jersey in such a deep hole that, even after Christie’s reforms, the state has one of the nation’s shakiest pension systems and an economy that was going nowhere even before the housing bubble burst. The Garden State’s business environment is... More

It’s all China’s fault! That’s the take-away from the Senate, which is enthusiastically pushing a bill designed to punish China for purposefully undervaluing its currency. The future of the legislation is unclear, since neither the House nor the White House has signed on, but... More

European governments must learn to treat Greece like any other nation.

While some state-organized pension plans are floundering, at least they have dedicated funding sources. People contribute to them. The plans invest. What if they did not? This is the circumstance now facing the federal government, whose committed obligations to retired federal workers now compares to the anticipated unfunded commitment to Social Security beneficiaries.

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Governors not running for president offer some encouraging policy prescriptions.

There is ample reason to be angry at financiers, and real change is needed in how they operate. But the European Commission's proposal to tax financial transactions, despite its noble intellectual lineage, is no solution to Europe’s problems – or to the world's.