Since the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United decision restored the First Amendment rights of businesses and unions, "disclosure" has become the watchword for Democrats hoping to muzzle political speech by corporations. The latest gambit is to intimidate companies via the shareholder proxy process. More |
In the midst of the never-ending conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, the trade regulations between the two areas are part of a set of bizarre rules that challenge the imagination. |
The agenda to restore growth and the middle class is clear. It’s not Robin Hood policies—those won’t halt economic decline. Rather, it’s the tough work of ensuring engineers educated and technologies developed in America build America, developing conventional energy instead of sending environmental challenges and jobs abroad, and cutting banks down to size to again serve their... More |
Between 1984 and 2009, the median net worth of a member of the House more than doubled, according to the analysis of financial disclosures, from $280,000 to $725,000 in inflation-adjusted 2009 dollars, excluding home equity. More |
Patent protection is key to incentivizing costly research for health miracles More |
If students can't afford the cost of a legal education, without loans, they should think about other careers. Debt is choking too many recent law graduates, bringing anger and unhappiness into their lives. More |
Why unemployment is worse than you think. More |
In Pontiac, just about everything must go as city puts assets up for sale. More |
The American Wind Energy Association has begun a major lobbying effort in Congress to extend some soon-to-expire renewable-energy tax credits. And to bolster that effort, the lobby group’s CEO, Denise Bode, is calling the wind industry “a tremendous American success story.” |
This week's payroll-tax shenanigans have been almost a parody of Washington dysfunction, with politicians engaging in brinksmanship over a policy -- another year of reduced payroll taxes -- that everyone seems to agree will be enacted in the end. |
In the private sector as well as government, new products and programs that do well in small tests often fail when they are rolled out to a larger audience. More |
Canada's prime minister restates that if there's no Keystone XL pipeline in the works, not to worry. Our northern ally will still be our friend as it sends its tar sands oil to Asian markets. More |
People assume that little start-ups are creative and big firms are slow and bureaucratic. But that is a gross oversimplification. More |
Windy City pols are tapping Illinois with bailouts for their hometown. Now downstate legislators are fighting back. More |
Governments on both sides of the Atlantic are trying to use the crisis to grow rather than shrink. More |
Government employees have great pensions. The rest of us do not. More |
Many conservatives are in no mood to forgive Mitt Romney for passing the Massachusetts health care law that became the model for Obamacare. Newt Gingrich is the latest beneficiary of this phenomenon. But those who seek a conservative candidate on health care are going backward if they choose Gingrich. Newt's record on health care -- and especially health care entitlements -- makes even Romney's... More |
Over the last several years, Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, and Novartis -- and most other pharmaceutical giants, which once seemed unassailable -- have announced huge layoffs. Drug discovery jobs have disappeared by the thousands in the United States and by the hundreds in Europe as the industry has cut costs in order to adjust to what is widely perceived as the end of the blockbuster-drug era. More |
A new study suggests that as many as one-fifth of public pension plans are in danger of running out of money without reform. Without causing a panic, it's clear that the time has come for stakeholders, trustees and plan sponsors in these systems to ask penetrating questions and get to work on solutions -- pronto. More |
While we are not told what fairness means, we are told the government can attain it. More |
In a 2010 paper, Gabriel Roth, a transportation economist, concluded that federal involvement in highway finance increases costs taxpayers in three significant ways. More |
We need to encourage investment, not penalize it. More |
Andrew Cuomo’s new tax hike, which the state's big business groups are actually supporting, makes sense if you believe that the last few years have been an aberration, that it’s the two decades before that are “normal.” That is, Wall Street profits will soon soar again, year in and year out, just as they did in the ’80s, ’90s and early 2000s. But the evidence suggests Wall St. is in... More |
Unless state and local governments take steps now to reduce future costs, or unless they plan on suddenly repudiating their promises to their public-sector work forces one day, every dollar in unfunded pension and health-care costs is up to a dollar less in the future value of a house. More |
Merck announced this week that it's opening a new R&D center in Beijing, with 47,000 square feet of labs and 600 employees. And this isn't just for pre-clinical research, but for everything from drug discovery to clinical trials. Reuters reports that Merck isn't the only company ramping up investment in China. More |
Andy Stern talks with envy about Chinese plans for a long-term seven percent growth rate. The Middle Kingdom may or may not carry that off, but when you're starting with the better part of a billion people in poverty, it shouldn't be that hard to do. What Stern neglects to mention is that the policies that have already moved out of poverty more Chinese than the entire population of the U.S. were changes directly away from... More |
When candidates flip-flop, their poll numbers suffer, but when countries flip-flop, entire economies suffer. This scenario is playing out in India after the government flip-flopped on its decision to allow retail giants such as Wal-Mart to own a majority 51% stake in joint operations with a local partner. More |
The 2008 financial crisis displayed characteristics of a classic bank run, but people holding bank accounts weren't the ones scrambling to get their cash. It was lenders demanding their money from other financial institutions. Indeed, today's panics are more likely to involve major financial institutions and are largely hidden from plain sight until they are severe enough to trigger plunging stock prices, bankruptcies,... More |
Municipal governments in the U.S. are in a precarious financial situation. Tepid economic growth combined with changes in state aid signal continued revenue weakness. The cost of meeting pension and healthcare obligations is crowding out key services and infrastructure spending. In the face of these challenges restructurings (both in and out of court) are inevitable; and continued efforts to deny this will only increase... More |
Rhode Island, a union-dominated state, where Democrats control even bigger legislative majorities than in California, recently passed meaningful pension reform. Time magazine called Rhode Island "The Little State That Could." By contrast, California is "The Big State That Can't." More |
China agrees to send us $500 billion worth of consumer and industrial goods every year, but agrees to sell us those manufactured goods at a substantial 20 percent discount for only $400 billion thanks to China's policy of undervaluing its currency. Shouldn't we be thankful? More |
Tax hikes to fund pension benefits for public employees with a value far beyond what most private workers will ever accumulate for their retirement. More |
In the era of the knowledge economy, the urgency of controlling college costs is not at odds with the urgency of increasing college attainment. Both goals are necessary if society is to do all it can to help more Americans succeed and thrive in the global job market. More |
There are signs that America’s era of human-capital superiority may be coming to an end. That has disturbing economic implications. For one thing, the severity of the recent recession—and the limping recovery—can be attributed partly to deficiencies in human capital. For another, when economic growth eventually resumes, the condition of the country’s human capital will determine how well Americans profit... More |