Michael Bloomberg just gave New York’s politicians a timely lesson on the minimum wage — even though he was talking about cigarettes.

The bailout of Cyprus ignores its huge gas reserves, which could contribute to European prosperity.

The “smart process” is a market economy where smart people find the incentives to cooperate so that they can innovate.

Three years after enactment of the landmark legislation extending health care coverage to 27 million uninsured people, many in Congress and a majority of Americans are coming face to face with a daunting reality.

Equality in health is arguably a prerequisite for all other measures of well-being. The health gap is shrinking.

In the past three decades, the number of Americans who are on disability has skyrocketed. The rise has come even as medical advances have allowed many more people to remain on the job, and new laws have banned workplace discrimination against the disabled. Every month, 14 million people now get a disability check from the government.

For more than three years, Chancellor George Osborne has insisted that his austerity goal is to reduce the size of the British state – and to unleash private-sector prosperity. The centrepiece of his Budget 2013 speech on Wednesday – his “Help to Buy” scheme for would-be house-purchasers – could help to smash those goals.

America can boast only 500 green jobs in solar electric power generation, but 886,000 green jobs in government — many for passage of environmental laws, enforcement of environmental regulations, and administration of environmental program.

Taxpayers will subsidize the new Atlanta Falcons stadium to the tune of $554 million.  The costs are spread out through bond issuance, and flows from the Hotel Motel Tax which accrue in the year they are incurred. This is a significant subsidy, one that the Falcons’ ownership will take happily to the bank.

The benefits of appealing to the creative class accrue largely to its members—and do little to make anyone else any better off.

There's a growing sense among some leaders that municipal bankruptcy -- unthinkable just a few years ago -- may be a valuable tool.

Beyond the District of Columbia, the rest of the country is starting to tackle some of its deeper competitive problems. Businesses and politicians are not waiting for the federal government to ride to their rescue.

Depositors aren't being asked to cough up additional money to meet a tax liability. To the contrary, a portion of Cypriot deposits will be confiscated -- electronically, no less -- by the government.

I would bet a goodly sum of money that if you picked at random ten tenured economists from top-20 economics departments, and asked them to list what an 18-year-old should do to increase his chances of getting high wages, a majority would say “go to college.” There also exists a marriage wage premium, which is roughly as significant and as consistent as the college wage premium. But economists rarely talk about... More

Why do some cities grow faster than others? Why do some generate more wealth? Why do some decline?

Back in my teaching days, many years ago, one of the things I liked to ask the class to consider was this: Imagine a government agency with only two tasks: (1) building statues of Benedict Arnold and (2) providing life-saving medications to children. If this agency's budget were cut, what would it do?

One program that is part of Medicare is already successful at controlling health costs. We should learn from it.

With professional golfers and hedge fund managers talking about moving to lower-tax enclaves, states are stepping up audits on top earners who flee.

Economists working with a variety of different data sets and different statistical techniques to study the impact of national debt on economic growth have come to similar conclusions.

How agriculture subsidies waste money, distort the economy, and steal from the poor to give to the rich.

...but without the oil.

America’s proxy season will pit management against owners as never before.

Fear of carbon emissions and climate change has catalyzed a major development within modern environmentalism: the emergence of pro-nuclear Greens.

The White House will continue to push for such a defiict bargain to include new limits on the value of the charitable tax deduction. Indeed, new Treasury Secretary Jack Lew testified, during his Senate confirmation hearings, that capping charitable deductions at 28 percent of their value, even as the top marginal income tax rate rises to 39.6 percent, should be part of “an even-handed approach” to tax reform.

For months, states have been mulling the Medicaid expansion–one of the most controversial provisions of the 2010 Affordable Care Act.It comes down to trust. Consider what the federal government promised states with Build America Bonds.

Technological progress makes face-to-face contact more, not less, important. A complicated world needs personal interactions, and the cities that enable those interactions, to promote innovation.

The ranks of Republican governors refusing to expand Medicaid has shrunk in recent weeks. Nationwide, 14 of the nation’s 28 Republican governors have rejected the federally funded expansion. Eight of the holdouts are in the South. Carol Steckel sides with the governors who have decided not to expand Medicaid.

The death of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, ongoing problems in Iran, and trouble brewing in Nigeria, make America’s economy more vulnerable than ever to the loose cannons who oversee some of the rich oil fields we depend on. But we don’t have to be hostages to foreign oil when we’re sitting on enough rich natural gas to be energy independent.

When an employer tries to pay a worker one more dollar as take rates are rising, the employee takes home slightly more than 50 cents. Most employee benefits, however, are tax free. That means that the benefit could be worth half its cost and still be a good deal for the employees.

Americans don’t need today’s extreme copyrights to be creative. Neither do the citizens of the world. We need sensible protections that balance financial incentives with creative freedom.

In some sense the current dramatic policy changes in Sweden are just a continuation, after an interruption of several years, of a dis-interventionist trend that began in the 1990s.

Personalized drug therapy will be a boon to patients.

The administration was not been able to tap into the heavy pressure that comes from deep-pocketed and well-connected groups like the Chamber, the Business Roundtable, the Financial Services Forum and many others putting out statements and sending breathless letters to the Hill demanding immediate action, as they did during the cliff fight.

The inability of the FDA to keep pace with changes in medical science threatens both economic prosperity and public health. The drug-approval process is glacial: It takes about 12 years and $1.2 billion to develop a single new drug that is approved by the FDA.