The city's pension liabilities are nearly 700 percent the size of revenues, far exceeding troubled Detroit's ratio.

In Chile, a major study shows the nation's private retirement accounts provide workers pensions worth 87% of their salaries, 73% of that from profits on savings. So much for the canard about the perils of markets.

Vladimir Putin tries to keep former Soviet republics in Moscow’s economic orbit.

Taxpayers fund the stadiums, antitrust law doesn't apply to broadcast deals, the league enjoys nonprofit status, and Commissioner Roger Goodell makes $30 million a year. It's time to stop the public giveaways to America's richest sports league—and to the feudal lords who own its teams.

In most states insurance premiums will increase, the author argues.

I believe that a real escape from the box labeled poverty requires several fundamentals and they all involve entrepreneurial thinking.

It may seem cruel to question whether a person should get help rebuilding a home or a business after a flood or fire, so few people have asked such questions. From 2004 through 2011, an eight-year period, the Government Accountability Office has found that Washington made 26 percent more disaster declarations compared to the previous eight years. The problem is that these federal bailouts encourage risky future... More

The Great American Energy Boom is having a major ripple effect on the shipbuilding industry, which thanks to a 1920s maritime law, is busier than it has been in decades. Some ten supertankers are currently under construction at U.S. shipyards, with orders for another 15 in the pipeline. That may not seem like a huge number, but considering there are only about 75 such tankers plying American ports now, it represents a... More

Here are three reasons why selecting a new Fed chairman has generated such interest. None are good news for the economy.

Business and labor are going to war over the nonprofit worker centers that union officials increasingly see as the future of their movement. The organizing groups are thriving amid the decline in traditional unions, and campaigns, like Fast Food Forward, have made a splash by staging walkouts of fast-food workers who are demanding $15 per hour in wages and the right to unionize.

Sacreblu! The French are angry because the competiveness of French soccer teams will suffer thanks to the country's high taxes.

Charities run by business execs strive to measure accurately their impact on society.

It’s not that the president accepted or rejected Summers; the problem is that he did neither. Obama’s way is to float a name, make some offhand noises of support when the attacks begin, and ditch the person when the whining starts to get loud.

....not an investment. It could be the most important lesson from the Great Recession.

This week, Apple store employees are busy getting ready to sell the company’s new line of iPhones, the colorful iPhone 5C and the improved iPhone 5S. Although these workers earn an average of $11 a hour, there's no sign of protests from the union-backed worker centers that organized nationwide fast food worker strikes in August.

Since the fiscal meltdown of 2008, New York is at a more pronounced competitive disadvantage with cities that don’t squeeze their citizens as tightly through high taxes. Wall Street, New York’s revenue gold mine since the mid-1980s, is retrenching, and in an era of slower growth, businesses will be less willing to shoulder costs that they can avoid by relocating.

We are not stuck with the slow-growth scenario and the endless and frustrating Washington policy debates about dividing a shrinking pie. Over the past year, a series of studies from research institutes and industry have laid out a compelling new vision of a highgrowth future—one that that could revolutionize manufacturing and energy, create employment for the jobless generation, and bring back rising living... More

A plan to rescue some Californians from possible foreclosure sets a dangerous precedent.

There are myriad reasons why the future should bring more technological progress than ever before – perhaps the most important being that technological innovation itself creates questions and problems that need to be fixed through further technological progress. If we rethink how innovation happens, we have every reason to suspect that we ain’t seen nothing yet.

A simple federal law which says that websites cannot be sued for content posted by visitors  has functioned as a permission slip for the whole Internet that says: “Go innovate.” Entrepreneurs have responded by founding the user-generated content sites we know and love today.

At the very moment that Obamacare is poised to spend nearly $2 trillion to expand traditional insurance coverage to about 30 million uninsured, new synergies between genomics companies and providers, advanced diagnostics, and a wave of mobile health apps are unraveling old assumptions about health care. Top-down controls on health-care... More

Coase's efforts in the 1950s to better understand the law of property revealed totally surprising ways that private property rights outperform judges and bureaucrats at ensuring that resources are used efficiently. I

Resistance is growing among some unions against the AFL-CIO’s push to strengthen its bonds with liberal groups outside of labor. Union leaders told The Hill that they have questions on how the nation’s largest federation plans to include environmental and civil society organizations under the AFL-CIO banner. Labor has sometimes clashed with groups — even if the two factions both often align with Democrats... More

The rating agency Standard & Poor’s (S&P) claims that the federal case against them is motivated by retaliation for its 2011 decision to strip the United States of its “AAA” credit rating.   It might be easy to dismiss this claim, but they aren’t the only ones in this situation.

Constitutional pension protections in some states elevate what is fair to workers over what is affordable to taxpayers.

The sharp decline in the country’s fertility rate during the economic downturn has come to an end, federal data show, as an improving economy encouraged Americans to resume having babies.

Equality-by-numbers advocates should be thinking about women’s progress in terms of what women show that they want, not what the spreadsheets say they should want.

The Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of conservative groups has revived old fears about the agency’s vast taxing and auditing powers, so easy to abuse. But the IRS isn’t alone in holding those powers. Across the country, states and municipalities have endowed thousands of revenue and audit bureaucracies with similar capabilities. Critics complain that officials use these... More

Supporters of the Affordable Care Act have heralded the recent slowdown in health-care spending as evidence that the law is working. Unfortunately for them, Obamacare has nothing to do with the trend. Economists have argued that the slowdown can be explained, in good measure, by the sluggish economy and consumers bearing greater financial responsibility for their health-care decisions.

In the national debate over regulations, there is one thing upon which all sides can agree: the federal rulemaking system is deeply flawed. Over the years, Congress and presidents have tinkered with the inner-workings of the regulatory apparatus. Despite those tweaks, the current system lacks any institutional mechanism to expunge unneeded federal restrictions.

Under pressure from civil-rights activists, federal bank regulators have killed tougher mortgage rules requiring minimum down payments and credit scores for loans bundled into securities. Here we go again.

According to a report, the Obama administration is considering offering insurance subsidies—intended for the uninsured—to labor union members who already have employer-sponsored coverage.