‘The Last Conservative’ is a title Friedman himself would have rejected. Time was, the merits of Universal Basic Income were up for debate. No longer. As so many arguments on federal entitlement expansion, the UBI debate has slid over from whether to how. Or even, how many? How many undocumented migrants and Minnesotans can join the few in ...

When it comes to taxes, the interesting thing about presidents is not that they are celebrities or deities on earth. AOC nearly got it right. The Democratic lawmaker recently chastised her Republican colleague, Andy Biggs of Arizona, for praising IRS whistleblowers. It is hypocritical to call on these folk while also stripping the resources ...

We should be skeptical of grand plans couched in terms of economics. Americans freeze like deer in the headlights when our leaders confront them with fancy economic plans. For example, Treasury secretary Janet Yellen has begun campaigning for a new experiment, what she calls modern supply-side economics. Such terminology disorients plenty ...

The money supply is only half the equation. Congress and the president need to encourage innovation and productivity. It’s all on Jerome Powell. That’s the attitude this summer as voters, lawmakers and policy makers look to the Federal Reserve chairman to restore America’s economy. American faith in the Fed chairman is based on a kind of ...

President Biden doesn't want merely to showcase Franklin Roosevelt. He wants to replicate him. As President Roosevelt once did with the New Deal, Biden intends to spend to spur growth, though Biden's proposals are magnitudes greater. As Roosevelt once did, Biden argues that helping unions helps the worker, and he hopes to undo 27 states' "Right ...

It takes a Coolidge. You can’t get the votes, idiot. That’s how policy analysts rebut anyone who suggests that the best Republican platform is the old one. They say the era of advancing the abstractions of traditional liberty, austere government, and low taxes is past; to win, Republicans have to act like Demo­crats, offering social ...

Getting America to full employment again won’t be easy. As a recent study by the University of Chicago’s Becker-Friedman Institute shows, the COVID-19 lockdown has changed the dynamic of working. Some workers are now collecting more dollars under the CARES Act, the law that funds payroll protection, than they did when they worked. Those ...

Is the country headed toward a second Great Depression? The economic outlook amid the covid-19 pandemic is certainly grim. More than 17 million workers have applied for unemployment benefits in the past four weeks. And as the economic downturn deepens, some forecasters are predicting unemployment levels as high as 30 percent, well above even ...

“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” as President Obama’s adviser, Rahm Emanuel, said in the early days of the Obama presidency. Mr. Emanuel’s point was that public uncertainty in a crisis gives the party in power greater license, enabling it to execute on pre-crisis agenda items. The Emanuel Rule is a wonderful rule. But even with ...

Talk "Morning in America," like Ronald Reagan. Tell the country we can outgrow our troubles. That's the basic script that Republican Party candidates are following in their campaigns for the presidency.But Americans know there's something illogical in the idea of outgrowing our troubles. Exactly what that is becomes clear when you ...

The simple levy hasn't been this talked about since 1996. More progressivity means more progress. Especially after 2008. That's the Democratic tax philosophy seven autumns after the financial crisis. Voters are still frustrated by the arbitrary quality of the rescues and the uneven quality of the recovery. So Hillary Clinton proposes increases ...

It's Ben Carson's turn to get real on taxes. This is what some Republicans have been saying since Donald Trump released details of his tax plan.Carson, who is still nose to nose with Trump in the polls, has so far stuck with the simple idea he first began mooting years ago: a 10 percent flat tax on income modeled on the biblical tithe.A ...

Growth first. The rest will follow. That's considered Reaganite policy, and many American Republicans follow it. This week, for example, Jeb Bush is putting forward his own all-growth tax plan. He wants to get America out of the "New Normal" of slower, European-level growth. The Bush reforms contain multiple measures aimed at freeing the ...

'We're fried." That's what Ray Kroc would say if he could speak from the grave. The father of the McDonald's hamburger empire would be referring to the recent decision by the National Labor Relations Board to modify some of its definitions.New rules will treat McDonald's and other franchising companies as "joint employers" of the workers in ...

The child credits and new rates pit groups against one another in a way that across-the-board rate cuts do not. Can a technical debate over tax plans trigger an identity crisis in the Republican Party? Apparently, yes. Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida and Mike Lee of Utah recently launched their “Economic Growth and Family Fairness Tax Reform ...

Pension and benefit obligations weigh down our cities. Trash disposal in Chicago costs $231 per ton, versus $74 in non-union Dallas. ‘Which side are you on?” That was the question posed nearly a century ago in Florence Reece’s song about the bitter war between miners and coal bosses in Harlan County, Ky. Many Americans, including ...

How Calvin Coolidge handled a 1919 police strike in Boston holds lessons for New York today. When television showed police turning their backs on Mayor Bill de Blasio recently, many viewers instinctively rotated in their chairs along with the police.

After all, Mayor de Blasio’s pandering to race-oriented special-interest groups has appalled many voters. More than half of New Yorkers recently told Quinnipiac pollsters that they disapprove of the way the mayor handles the police department. The next move, a strike by the ...

Can the state seize a private home simply because it wants to? Sometime soon Judge Julio Mendez, of New Jersey’s Superior Court, will decide whether a 67-year-old piano tuner named Charlie Birnbaum gets to keep his house.

New Jersey’s mighty Casino Reinvestment Development Authority has invoked eminent domain to take the Birnbaum property. The modest Atlantic City “three-flat” is on Oriental Avenue, a name readers will know from the board game Monopoly. But the Birnbaum home sits in the ...

Some highly placed people don’t want a serious discussion of quantitative easing. Back in the late 1990s and right up to 2007, journalists occasionally wondered about two big enterprises called Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Fannie had come out of an obscure period of American history, the New Deal. Freddie had been created more recently, but no ...

The GOP is running away from tax cuts this year — which is a mistake. "Compassion" is the watchword among Republicans on the national level in their great effort to appear kind fellows. Old Republican proposals such as tax cuts aren't rated the presidential-election winners that compassion is. Indeed, these days, to put tax cuts first is to ...

IN COMING YEARS American high schoolers will be learning their history from snippets or whole segments of the new PBS series The Roosevelts. Produced by Ken Burns, the series supplies 14 hours of sustainedly solid narrative on the presidencies and eras of Theodore Roosevelt and his cousin Franklin D. Roosevelt. These presidencies matter for ...

‘He is at once God and their intimate friend,” wrote journalist Martha Gellhorn back in the 1930s of President Franklin Roosevelt. The quote comes from The Roosevelts, the new Ken Burns documentary that PBS airs this month. But the term “documentary” doesn’t do The Roosevelts justice. “Extravaganza” is more like it: In not one but 14 lavish ...

Young people can learn to take care of themselves, and financing college is one place to start. Fall is a season when we learn a whole lot about the business transaction we call undergraduate education. On the one hand, perhaps at home, there's the nervy spectacle of the college-admissions process. On the other hand, there are the results ...

The corporate-tax angle is the focus of the headlines on the story of Burger King's plan to merge with the Canadian chain Tim Hortons. The difference in corporate-tax rates, the United States's 39.1 percent and Canada's 26.5 percent, certainly provides reason for Burger King to act. That is what Warren Buffett's decision to back the ...

Canada's Tax-Free Savings Accounts are much more flexible than Roth IRAs. What are we waiting for? It's only 2014, but politicians are already casting about for the magic tax vehicle they can ride to the White House in 2016. Most strategists agree that a plan to lift the financial pressure on the middle class will do the trick. All ...

A new study shows that government aid and World Bank projects are not enough to spur lasting recovery. New Orleans is growing, but is New Orleans back?Not entirely.That's the exchange we'll all be hearing in the coming weeks as the city marks the ninth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Interesting new businesses have sprung up. Many schools ...

Walgreen’s executives didn’t tell the public that moving overseas wouldn’t save Walgreen’s tax dollars because that would not be true. The U.S. corporate tax, at 35% ranks among the highest in the world, and shifting overseas through an acquisition does reduce the tax bill for companies, and therefore increase profits for ...

If the Republicans win the Senate in November, one project they’ll likely undertake is reform of the Federal Reserve. But whoever wins, monetary reform can’t come too soon. For the current moment features a serious disconnect.

Congress and many economists insist that official metrics assure everything is all right. A little inflation? That’s benign. The Consumer Price Index, the official indicator, tells us so. The paternal Federal Reserve is supposed to be taking care of the rest. ...

Things are more expensive than government statistics say they should be. A lot of people who watched Rick Santelli blow up on CNBC the other day thought the same thing: “That guy needs a vacation — and so do I. The world just doesn’t make sense to him, or maybe me, either.” So you head up to the cabin. Maybe it’s the same cabin you rented back ...

Casey Mulligan gets the Hayek Prize for proving that redistribution hobbles the economy over time. A season and a half to midterms, Republicans are already working hard on softening their message. Unemployment is still not low enough, they say. So perhaps there is a federal program or two the GOP might support after all. And, should a ...

Capital may be stalling. But watch out for Capital.The first Capital is, of course, the anti-wealth bestseller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, by the French professor Thomas Piketty. As much projectile as book, Capital was hurtling forward, seemingly unstoppably, until journalists and scholars began to discover flaws in its data. ...

We’ve long known the economic case. The humanitarian case is even stronger. The economic case against the minimum wage exists, and has been made by me and others often enough. But there’s another, even stronger case against the rule. That is the humanitarian case. And until that case, too, receives consideration, the debate will always be ...

Joe Biden thinks it helped end the Great Depression. It actually extended it. When Maryland governor Martin O’Malley signed a minimum wage of $10.10 an hour into law this week, U.S. labor secretary Tom Perez argued that a higher wage would help growth in Maryland, saying “it’s good for the economy.” The governor’s press release supplied ...

Don’t lift the Social Security cap. Before 2016 is out, they’ll lift this cap.That’s my prediction about the future of a rarely considered feature of the payroll tax, the “wage base limit.” This magic number, $117,000 for 2014, is the amount of earnings at which American employees cease to pay their 6.2 percent in Social Security taxes. ...

Court cases involving religion have a way of stopping big social legislation. Some time in the coming months, the Supreme Court will hand down its opinion in Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby, the case of the retailer that claims that its religious freedom or that of its employees is violated by contraceptive coverage required as part of the Affordable ...

Banks, and the wonders of compounding, can do more for people than tax committees can. For their first encounter with the principle of compounding, many Americans have Walt Disney to thank. It is his and the Sherman brothers’ 1964 version of the musical Mary Poppins that includes the song “Fidelity Fiduciary Bank.” A row of senescent bankers, ...

What’s next after the Oscars? More Gatsby, of course. “The Great Gatsby,” featuring Leonardo DiCaprio and coming in May, will be the fourth, or by some counts the fifth or sixth, movie version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel about the illusion created by false wealth in ...

The 30th president had two lion cubs. Their names? Budget Bureau and Tax Reduction. Only Reagan could fix this.

That's the intuitive reaction to the surge of spending and budgetary challenges in Washington today. It's hard to think of another Republican with the fortitude to push back against the outlays, to make government smaller, to lower taxes. And to show that such moves can ...