Biden’s policies would continue to make fuel and goods expensive. Republican candidates’ proposals would help reduce their cost. Although Americans know that 2024 is an election year, they might not know that energy is on the ballot. The election's outcome will determine the amount people will pay for gasoline and electricity; what appliances ...

If Governor Murphy installed all his planned wind projects, New Jersey residents would each pay $8,000. Danish wind company Orsted did New Jersey residents a favor when, despite the state's tax incentives, it withdrew from its Ocean Wind 1 and 2 offshore-wind projects due to financial difficulties. Democratic Governor Phil Murphy's ...

Biden can use these new wars to announce that he has changed his policies on U.S. domestic oil production. Oil and natural-gas prices spiked after Iran-backed Hamas invaded Israel over the weekend. With the supposed transition to net zero, some might expect the prices of electric batteries, wind turbines, and solar panels to follow suit, but ...

The Michigan Ford–CATL plant would enable the CCP to benefit from tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act. With Ford's announcement that it would suspend work on its $3.5 billion Michigan–China battery partnership due to the United Auto Workers strike, the beleaguered company may have extricated itself from a political briar bush. The ...

Electrification of vehicles is leading not only to shrinking worker incomes but to a fundamental fracturing of the Democratic Party coalition. The big economic news at the end of last week was the start of a strike by the United Auto Workers (UAW) union against all three major U.S. automakers. This is the first strike against President ...

Harold Hamm provides the story of his life and a timely ode to American energy independence. There's no book like Game Changer: Our 50-Year Mission to Secure America's Energy Independence (Forefront Books, 2023) by Harold Hamm. The 300-page life story spans not only the history of oil production, but the history of a boy with twelve siblings ...

The EPA has America on a path to all pain and no gain. It was a bad week for anyone who thought China would cooperate on emissions reduction. President Xi Jinping reiterated that his country would set its own path on the issue and not be influenced by outside factors, according to the Washington Post and Bloomberg. This contradicts Xi's 2015 ...

New proposed regulations on automobile emissions from the Environmental Protection Agency would require new car sales to be 60% electric by 2030 and 67% by 2032, compared to fewer than 6% in 2022. EPA is also planning new rules for power plants, driving up the costs of the electricity needed to charge these vehicles. These rules would ...

Thousands of Belgian and Dutch farmers are being sacrificed on the altar of climate change. They are losing their livelihoods as their governments crack down on emissions of nitrogen oxide (from manure) and the use of ammonia in fertilization. On March 5, Peterdutch63, @paslagter, a Dutch farmer, tweeted, "Tonight was the last time we milked ...

Research suggests that electric vehicles are no silver bullet against global warming. The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) will allocate more than $15 billion in credits and loans for electric vehicle and battery manufacturers, as well as tax credits for buyers of electric vehicles. The stated rationale: these cars produce fewer carbon emissions ...

On the last day of its term, the Supreme Court stops the Environmental Protection Agency from making policy without express congressional authorization. The Supreme Court saved a crucial decision for the last day of its term, ruling 6–3 in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency that the Clean Air Act does not allow the EPA to move ...

If President Biden wants to tackle higher prices, he should forget about more tax hikes and instead reverse his policies on domestic oil and natural gas production. Amid a crashing stock market and a looming recession, President Biden has reiterated his plans to reduce inflation by raising taxes on corporations and upper-income Americans. ...

To avoid recession and reduce inflation, it's time for a change. New inflation data show annualized inflation persistently above 8%, with inflation over the past 3 months running at almost 10%. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said that "we have both the tools we need and the resolve it will take" to deal with it. But Mr. Powell cannot do ...

Workers around the country face a sellers’ market for their skills—and they’d rather keep the dues money for themselves. Tight labor markets empower workers more than any union. That's why it's unlikely that the 7,500 Amazon workers at the JFK8 plant in Staten Island, New York, who are voting today on whether to join the Amazon Labor Union, ...

President Biden's decision to ban imports of Russian oil products should be accompanied by a decision to increase production at home, and replace Russian crude oil with additional imports of Canadian crude. Our Canadian friends have plenty to sell us. By announcing a reversal of prior policies President Biden would change expectations about ...

Enjoy Christmas travel now, but get ready for flight diversions and cancellations after the holidays. In preparation for the rollout of 5G wireless services by AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile on January 5, the Federal Aviation Administration will shortly issue new rules to keep aircraft and passengers safe. The FAA will prohibit flying to ...

The $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill that was voted out of the Senate on August 10 has no funding for strengthening the Global Positioning System (GPS) to make sure that Americans can navigate without getting spoofed. The House should correct the Senate's omission. With $50 billion over the next decade allocated in the bill ...

An executive order to mandate electric-vehicle sales presents economic and environmental problems. On August 5, President Biden issued an executive order setting a goal that, by 2030, half of new vehicles sold in the United States must be electric–including fuel-cell electric, plug-in hybrids, and full-battery electric. Today, only about 3 ...

The Transportation Department has ideas for a backup, but it needs money from Congress. GPS is vital to Americans, but hacking it has never been easier. Protecting the civilian Global Positioning System, an invisible utility the federal government pays for, falls to Transportation Secretary ete Buttigieg. He would do well to use the results of ...

To allocate new infrastructure spending wisely, legislators need to understand how Americans’ habits have changed. Covid-19 caused a tsunami of changes to the transportation sector. In its wake, Congress shouldn't design the $1.9 trillion stimulus package as though Americans will eventually return to their pre-pandemic behavior. ...

The FCC’s decision to reallocate transportation safety spectrum will cost lives and slow America’s technological progress. Deaths from Covid-19 are rightly treated as a tragedy. Fatal road crashes are equally tragic, however. About 36,000 Americans died on the roads in 2019, and 2.7 million were injured. Just as government is working to ...

DONALD J. TRUMP wants to build a bricks-and-mortar wall to keep immigrants out of the United States. President Obama wants to build a virtual wall to keep companies from leaving. Neither is likely to work.On Monday, the Treasury Department issued new regulations in an attempt to limit "inversions" — in which American companies are acquired ...

With California and New York moving to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, it's worth asking which factors generate higher earnings.Big Brother can mandate a $15 hourly minimum wage, but Big Brother cannot mandate that firms hire workers. As minimum wages have risen, cashiers have vanished from drug stores and food trucks have ...

The Affordable Care Act never would have been passed had Congress known how it would develop. Obamacare barely passed Congress in 2010. If people had known how it would develop, the health-care act would likely never have become law. Back in 2009, when the law was proposed, and in 2010, when it was signed, the Affordable Care Act's ...

The hamburger chain’s parent company could be on the hook for liabilities at local eateries . Judge Lauren Esposito, in a trial in New York City, on Thursday began the process of determining whether McDonald's USA is a joint employer of the hamburger flippers who work in your local McDonald's. For McDonald's employees, the answer to the ...

Paul Krugman, writing in the New York Times, suggests that Americans should pick a president who favors a carbon tax. But not even Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have proposed a carbon tax as part of their tax plans. All candidates have put forward detailed tax plans, and a carbon tax is not included in any of ...

With Sen. Bernie Sanders even with Hillary Clinton in some national polls and his strong showing in Nevada on Saturday, his tax proposals warrant serious examination. Even if he does not win the primary, his popularity is encouraging Clinton's move to the left.Sanders wants to increase individual, capital gains, corporate, and payroll taxes — ...

Like an alcoholic at a bar, Congress won’t stop at just one swig. The value-added tax can pull in billions of dollars with a rate that seems low. Then, a small increase will net a few more billions. No wonder that almost all countries have a VAT.Republican Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Rand Paul of Kentucky propose a VAT as a way to pay for cuts ...

A costly new federal rule will hinder firms' ability to tell workers about the drawbacks of unionizing. The Labor Department is about to give organized labor a boost by tilting the law against business. It is proposing a new rule, due out in March to take effect before summer, that will require companies to make public the names of the ...

The overall state of the economy seems to predict presidential winners. Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump would benefit if the economy slowed this year. In eight of the past nine elections, if real GDP improved in an election year relative to the prior year, the presidential party in power won, and vice versa. Every ...

In an era of stagnating educational achievement and bloated public school budgets, America’s education system is in dire need of innovation. Despite strong opposition from entrenched interests, the growth in charter schools exemplifies educational innovation in cities and towns across the country.
Charter schools receive public funding but ...

Steven Greenhouse, writing in the Washington Post, offers a novel reason for why the Supreme Court should require teachers to pay union dues: to avoid punishing unions. He explains that "public-sector unions are among the biggest donors to labor-friendly Democratic candidates, and their lobbyists use their influence to go to bat for workers ...

This article originally appeared in MarketWatch"Women earn less than men across our economy — and women of color often lose out the most," Hillary Clinton says on her campaign website.She promises to fight for pay transparency and pass the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would give the federal government more power to intrude into firms' decisions ...

As 2015 winds down, here are seven opportunities Congress missed this year. If we could make them happen in 2016, we could eventually double our economic growth rate from 2% to 4%, enriching Americans and lowering our unemployment rate.Killing the Export-Import Bank. Congress eliminated the Export-Import Bank in the summer, but put it right ...

Although the Islamic State is located in some of the sunniest regions of the globe, it's making money selling not stolen solar panels and wind turbines but stolen oil. That should send a message to Congress, whose new $1.1 trillion spending bill extends the wind-production credit that expired last year and provides a new extension to the ...

Europe's negative interest rates are no way to boost long-term growth. Now that Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen has announced an increase in U.S. interest rates, what will happen in Europe, where rates are negative? Europe is resorting to negative rates to stimulate its economy, rather than reforming taxes and regulations. Europeans have ...

And Congress shouldn’t vote to spend billions of dollars keeping health insurers afloat. This week, as part of the reconciliation bill, Congress may vote on bailing out health-insurance companies losing money from their participation in the Affordable Care Act exchanges. With an $18 trillion national debt, Congress should stand firm and say no ...

While students from Yale University in Connecticut to Claremont McKenna in California are protesting, demanding more cultural sensitivity, safe spaces and trigger warnings, some students at Princeton University in New Jersey are fighting back. In response to a sit-in of the university president's office by 200 members of the Black Justice ...

New employment data for October led many to assume that a rate increase from the Federal Reserve is in the offing. "Strong Growth in Jobs May Encourage Fed to Raise Rates," wrote the New York Times, and "Strong Jobs Report Strengthens Case for December Fed Rate Liftoff," stated the Wall Street Journal.Not only was the strength of the jobs ...

The United States and Canada are the only two industrialized countries that confer automatic citizenship on babies born within the countries' borders, even if their parents are not citizens. In the United States, this is a constitutional right. The Fourteenth Amendment states that "all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and ...

Student athletes aren’t employees, and shouldn’t be allowed to form a union. A decision on whether college football players at Northwestern University should be permitted to unionize is expected later this month from the National Labor Relations Board, just as players are in training preparing for the upcoming season. In 2014 Peter Ohr, the ...

President Obama's Clean Power Plan for existing and new power plants stretches to a combined 2,328 pages, exclusive of supporting documents and fact sheets. The language is Orwellian, with talk of "a partnership between the EPA and the states under which the EPA establishes emission guidelines and the states take the lead on implementing them ...

The Internal Revenue Service swoops in with a money grab. Hey, employers, don't even think about reimbursing your workers' health-insurance premiums. Beginning this month, the IRS can levy fines amounting to $100 per worker per day or $36,500 per worker per year, with a maximum of $500,000 per firm. This Internal Revenue Service penalty is ...

This week or next, the Department of Labor will release new proposed rules on overtime pay. Those rules will fulfill President Obama's 2014 promise to raise the salary level at which employers are required to pay overtime. In an interview with the Huffington Post in March, the president said: "What we've seen is, increasingly, companies ...

"The Affordable Care Act is here to stay," gloated President Obama after the King vs. Burwell Supreme Court decision was announced on Thursday. "Anyone seeking to lead our country should stand up and support this decision," said Hillary Clinton. Not so fast. Today, June 26, is the first day on the path to the eventual rewriting of the ...

Members of the Wage Board, I am honored to be able to submit testimony on the subject of raising the minimum wage for fast food workers to $15 an hour. As former chief economist of the U.S. Department of Labor, I have followed and written about the minimum wage and related issues for many years. Currently I am senior fellow and director ...

Higher premiums, impenetrable bureaucracy — where’s the upside? Obamacare has enmeshed many Americans in a bureaucratic nightmare. True, the law has helped some uninsured people obtain coverage. But millions of people have seen their health-insurance plans canceled, because the plans did not meet the requirements of the Affordable Care ...

Facing unemployment, loan debt, expensive retiree payouts and more problems, young people need a lobby. Over the next few weeks 3.5 million of you will graduate and try to find jobs. We’re sorry to tell you that achieving success will be more difficult than it was for your parents or grandparents. Not because you’re less intelligent, or lazier ...

Forbes columnist and Tax Notes editor-in-chief Jeremy Scott suggests that Senator Marco Rubio would not be able to lead on tax reform if elected president because he does not have sufficient experience. "Rubio isn't on the Senate Finance Committee," writes Scott. (Full disclosure: I am a columnist for Tax Notes.)But a president's past ...

As April 15 approaches, many Americans would welcome a simpler tax plan. Sen. Mike Lee, a Republican from Utah, and Sen. Marco Rubio, a Republican from Florida, who is about to declare his candidacy for president, have published a draft tax plan with only two rates and an expanded child credit. But under their plan, tax rates will rise on ...

This week the House and Senate Budget Committees released their proposed budgets for fiscal year 2016. The chambers will go to conference on the budgets after the Easter recess, and a unified budget should pass Congress by the summer.This sounds normal. What is extraordinary is that it has failed to occur for so long. Congress has not passed ...

Gov. Cuomo's proposal to raise the city's hourly minimum wage from $8.75 to $11.50 would harm the very people it is intended to help - poor and low-skill New Yorkers. If the wage floor is raised, they would have fewer job opportunities and less chance of climbing the career ladder.To understand why, do a thought experiment. If raising the ...

Wisconsin now becomes the 25th 'right-to-work' state. Gov. Scott Walker on Monday signed legislation that made Wisconsin the 25th "right-to-work" state. Residents of the Badger State will no longer be required to join a union as a condition of employment. With half the states in the U.S. now designated as right to work, the rest will feel ...

It's bad enough that the Affordable Care Act is raising premiums and deductibles—and perhaps lowering your tax refund. In addition, the ACA has given the Food and Drug Administration the power to go after your favorite vending machine. By the end of next year, according to a new FDA rule, most snack machines must have calorie counts ...

EARLY next month the Supreme Court will hear arguments in King v. Burwell, the latest significant legal challenge to the Affordable Care Act. The petitioners argue that under the statute, the federal government is not allowed to provide health insurance subsidies in the 37 states that have either declined or failed to establish their ...

The Staples office-supply chain is now the latest victim in a series of politically charged attacks from the White House on corporations.In an interview with BuzzFeed, President Obama said: "There is no reason for an employer who is not currently providing health care to their workers to discourage them from either getting health insurance on ...

The good news is that the economy is creating more jobs than ever. Just consider—257,000 more jobs in January, 329,000 in December, and 423,000 in November. The bad news is that the labor force participation rate—the percentage of people who are employed or who are looking for work—has barely moved, from 63 percent in January 2014 to 62.9 ...

On Thursday, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions held a hearing on the National Labor Relations Board's Christmas power grab.
For those who missed it, NLRB General Counsel Richard Griffin announced in December that he had issued complaints against McDonald's franchised restaurants and McDonald's parent corporation ...

McDonald's Corp.'s new CEO, Steve Easterbrook, has a major task in front of him in addition to increasing sales of burgers: getting his company out of the clutches of the National Labor Relations Board.In December, NLRB General Counsel Richard Griffin announced he had issued complaints against McDonald's MCD, franchised restaurants and ...

You have to hand it to President Obama.Despite Democrats' loss of the House of Representatives in 2010 and the U.S. Senate in 2014, as well as the loss of 16 statehouses and 10 governorships since Obama's election in 2008, he keeps advocating for tax increases.The latest proposal was in Tuesday's State of the Union Address, where the ...

America could be helped if reforms there follow the current crisis
It is a tragedy that a country as rich in resources as Russia begins 2015 with major economic hurdles. Not only are oil prices falling, but the country is plagued by corrupt politics, stultifying state control and lack of property rights, which have resulted in a bankrupt ...

p>The questions of how many legal immigrants should be admitted to the United States, and what level of skills these immigrants should have, are among the most divisive issues in the current U.S. domestic policy landscape. Much of the controversy that they spark can be traced to a single issue: do immigrants help or harm the economy?As ...

Pundits are saying that even if Republicans win control of the Senate in Tuesday's elections, gridlock would continue. Senate Democrats would block major legislation, and, even if bills passed, President Obama would veto them.
But congressional Republicans and Democrats, as well as President Obama, have an interest in terminating the ...

Setting the groundwork for faster economic growth would help poorer Americans. Janet Yellen heads one of the most important agencies in America, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve. It has many tasks, but analyzing the state of inequality and education in America is not one of them. Nevertheless, Yellen on Friday returned to her role ...

The time federal workers spend on labor management relations has dramatically increased under President Obama, a strong supporter of unions. New report shows workers are increasingly spending time on union tasks. Most Americans think federal employees are working for the public. But a new report issued by the Office of Personnel Management ...

The federal government's fiscal year ends on September 30, concluding the month-long spending spree known as "use it or lose it" season in Washington--resulting in a slew of questionable purchases this month:
• The IRS spent $2,410,000 on "toner products" in a single purchase.
• The Department of Homeland Security paid $251,016 for "Aeron ...

Bipartisanship in Washington is not quite dead. Republicans and Democrats both praised the Department of Energy's approval of two new liquid natural gas export projects. With Russian gas exports to Europe slowing, and Russia solidifying its hold on eastern Ukraine, more approvals should be in the pipeline. But bureaucratic red tape from ...

On Friday at 8:30 a.m. the Bureau of Labor Statistics will publish the first government snapshot of August's economic activity-the monthly employment report. The details inside BLS's 25 tables are especially important this week, because the Fed is considering ending its zero interest policy if labor markets improve. Chair Yellen continues to ...

An efficiently run, volunteer-led program in South Carolina shows why. As kids return to school, many sincere education specialists see that the way to improve student achievement is to put more resources in schools. Another approach is to bring education closer to the home, and the home community, the model pioneered by the Neighborhood ...

The tale of the Internal Revenue Service missing emails gets more curious day by day. Thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by Judicial Watch, a conservative, non-partisan educational foundation, it was revealed on Friday that the emails of Lois Lerner, director of exempt organizations at the IRS, were backed up on ...

Writing in Sunday's Washington Post, Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko said, "We need U.S. natural gas to shore up our energy supplies so that we cannot be blackmailed by Moscow. We need a reliable partner and ally to help fuel our nation."

President Obama, are you listening? ...

The deeper issue is the European Central Bank papering over economic problems. The Portuguese crisis over Banco Espirito Santo should be a reality check for European markets. Espirito Santo is just the excuse — real problems lie far deeper.

The European Central Bank has been playing with fire, with junk bonds ultimately funded by German taxpayers. Investors are waking up and smelling smoke, and at some point they will get singed. ...

Feminists care more about supporting their political allies than their principles. One of the most powerful organizations in America is headed by a man. His chief of staff is a man. And although the institution has both male and female employees, it was revealed yesterday in a Washington Post report that its women employees make 87 percent as ...

For decades the Internal Revenue Service has been the most feared and the familiar agency to ordinary Americans. Many people spend countless hours preparing detailed information to send to the IRS with the implicit understanding that the personally-sensitive information will be kept at the highest levels ...

On Wednesday the Joint Economic Committee, under the chairmanship of Representative Kevin Brady of Texas, will hold a hearing on women in the workplace. I have been invited to testify.

Employment for women 16 years and older only reached pre-recession levels only in January 2014. Employment for prime-age women (25 to 54 years) is 2 million short of pre-recession levels. Their labor force participation rate declined from 76 percent before the recession to ...

Almost half a year has passed, and renewable energy producers are still in the dark as to whether they will get their 2.3 cents per kilowatt hour tax credit. Racehorses California Chrome and Tonalist might have to be depreciated over seven years, instead of three years. Elementary teachers do not know whether they will be able to write off $250 ...

Claims of ever-increasing shares of wealth going to top earners are a perennial complaint. This year, partly due to the publication of Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century, discussions of inequality are preoccupying policymakers and political pundits.

Today Economics21.org is releasing Income Inequality in America: Fact and Fiction, a series of essays from leading experts on different aspects of measuring inequality. For Winston Churchill, inequality was an unavoidable part of economic life in capitalist societies. "The ...

President Obama has called inequality "the defining challenge of our time." But on June 2 he will announce new "cap-and-trade" environmental regulations that will make the poor a lot poorer and the rich a little less rich.Mr. Obama said in his January State of the Union Address, "Wherever and whenever I can take steps without legislation to ...

‘It’s possible that, without the Fed, you could have had a bright future’. The following is an alternative address that Janet Yellen, chairwoman of the Federal Reserve, could give to graduating students of New York University today. She is free to borrow from it or use ...

Although climate change ranks close to the bottom of Americans' concerns, well below jobs and the economy, President Barack Obama is proposing a new set of solar energy policies that he describes as "good for job growth and good for our economy."

President Obama has described 2014 as a Year of Action. "Wherever I can go ahead and create my own opportunities for new jobs, I'm going to take it," he declared earlier this month in Mountain View, California. He praised companies such as Walmart that have installed solar ...

No country has ever attained prosperity with a weak currency. Five years after the beginning of the economic recovery, after rock-bottom interest rates and trillions of dollars of quantitative easing by the Federal Reserve, the economy is growing about 2%.
No country has attained prosperity by printing money and weakening its currency, and ...

The statutory language enabling the Federal Reserve system and the Federal Reserve Board is found in 12 U.S.C. Chapter 3. The language is tedious but not surprising. For example, the phrases "household formation" and the word "household" are not to be found.

Yet to understand what is slowing the economy, Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen is examining households and a great many other concepts that fall outside the Fed's jurisdiction. ...

Many famous economists, even some Nobel Prize winners, have made their career based on one innovative idea. Gary Becker, the Nobel Prize-winning economist who died on Saturday, aged 83, had not one innovative idea, but dozens. Economic concepts that we take for granted today, such as human capital theory, choice of numbers of children, and ...

The best part is that there would be no cost to Uncle Sam. The U.S. economy eked out a gain of 0.1% in the first quarter, the government said yesterday, as exports plummeted 12% and gross private investment tumbled 6.1%.
What’s worse, gross domestic product expanded 2.6% in the previous three ...

To cover the total unfunded liabilities of state governments, each person in the United States would have to pay $14,130. At some point, taxes — sales, property, income, or estate — will have to rise to cover this liability.
Unfunded liability differs greatly among the states, correlating closely with unionization requirements. All 10 states ...

The number of walk-in clinics is set to double in two years. As the Affordable Care Act reshuffles the health-care deck, some of the winners are walk-in clinics in drugstores and supermarkets, which offer treatments for simple illnesses and provide some preventative-care services such as flu ...

Rhode Island is a great state with friendly, hospitable people. Sadly, Rhode Island has the highest unemployment rate in the United States at 9.0 percent. The state needs some help.

On Tuesday, the Senate Budget Committee held a hearing in its ornate hearing room in the Dirksen Senate Office Building. The subject was economic growth and tax reform, just the sort of help that Rhode Island needs. ...

The House of Representatives has the opportunity to stall the economic recovery by following the Senate and passing an extension of unemployment insurance benefits. Or, the House could help the economy by just letting the bill die.

The Senate's timing is extraordinary. On Monday, just three days after Labor Department employment data for ...

4 reasons why exporting natural gas is the right thing for America. Americans opposed to the export of U.S. natural gas give many reasons for their position. But almost all of them are wrong.

The problem is that people underestimate the amount of this country’s natural gas and the potential effect exports could have on the world market. ...

On April Fools' Day the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions is holding a hearing on the Paycheck Fairness Act, sponsored by Senator Barbara Mikulski, who will reportedly chair the hearing.

The Paycheck Fairness Act, which mistakenly assumes that American women do not have paycheck fairness, lists 54 senators as ...

With the publication of a new White House report titled "The Impact of Raising the Minimum Wage on Women", President Obama is trying get women to support raising the hourly minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10. Women should not fall for a proposal that would hurt their job opportunities. Instead, they should demand measures that will increase ...

The low-interest-rate policy does more harm than good. Seniors, wake up and call Janet Yellen. With an increase in interest rates next year, as Chair Yellen implied in her press conference on Wednesday, she can restore your savings accounts to relevance. The end for low rates might be in sight, and that is good news, despite the initial ...

The idea that inequality limits a country's economic growth is on the verge of becoming conventional wisdom. But, despite the latest International Monetary Fund report, no one has proved the negative macroeconomic effects of inequality.Entitled Fiscal Policy and Income Inequality, the IMF report states that "there is growing evidence that ...

Pipeline would generate tax revenue, economic activity and jobs. Here at Canada’s University of Calgary, the world’s premier pipeline research center, the disadvantages of blocking the Keystone XL pipelines are obvious.

If President Obama does not approve Keystone XL (NYSE:TRP) , which will bring crude oil from Canada to be processed in our refineries near the Gulf, Alberta’s oil will go to Asia — and the United States will be the big loser. ...

As President Obama pushes to increase the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, supporters continue to mischaracterize its effects.

Despite a Congressional Budget Office report showing that 500,000 low-skilled people could lose their jobs by 2016 due to a higher minimum wage, some insist that raising the minimum wage will not affect employment.
...

As Washington politicians quibble over how to help low-income families, the Neighborhood Outreach Connection in Hilton Head, South Carolina, is stepping up to the plate. By setting up classrooms in poor communities to tutor children in the empty hours when they return from school, the community-based NOC is giving children the skills they need ...

CBO minimum wage report misses the mark. The Congressional Budget Office recently released a report with an estimate of the economic effects of raising the minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10 an hour.

The results have been generally viewed as a mixed blessing. On the one hand, CBO claims that overall income would increase for most households at the low end of the income scale. But the increased income comes at a cost: half a million workers would lose their jobs. ...

The economy is stumbling along at 2 percent annual GDP growth and employment growth continues to disappoint. One bright spot is energy, which is booming despite government obstacles. With more efficient regulation America could increase energy production, and next week Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) will release a bill to do just that.
A new report by ...

President Obama has done it again. Without consulting Congress, he has once more postponed the requirement that employers with 50 to 99 workers offer generous health insurance or pay a fine--this time until 2016.
Firms with 100 or more employees will have to offer insurance to only 70 percent of full-time workers in 2015 and 95 percent in 2016 ...

This week's mystery is why Volkswagen is helping the United Auto Workers unionize its plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee. One clue: the deputy chairman of Volkswagen's German supervisory board is Berthold Huber, chairman of the powerful German labor union IG Metall.

Unionizing the plant goes directly contrary to VW's interests. It would raise ...

With the State Department's announcement that the Keystone XL pipeline poses no environmental risks, the verdict is now in, and the pipeline should be approved.

The Keystone XL pipeline would allow oil to be transported from Alberta, Canada, to U.S. refiners near the Gulf of Mexico. President Obama's decision to delay approval for ...

Does Princeton University professor Paul Krugman have a bank account, check book, credit card, mortgage, or retirement account? In Monday's New York Times he characterizes those who achieve success in the financial sector as "wheeler- dealers, men who push money around and get rich by skimming some off the top as it sloshes by." But if he is ...

President Obama will deliver his State of the Union speech next week. Here is the State of the Union address I would like to see:

My fellow Americans, ...

Judge Paul L. Friedman of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled on Wednesday in Halbig v. Sebelius that people who sign up for health insurance on federal exchanges in 34 states can get subsidies, disappointing those who thought that the courts would strike down ...

The percentage of Americans who are working or who are looking for work has declined sharply since the 2007-2009 recession. The labor force participation rate is now at 62.8 percent, equal to 1978 levels before the movement of women into the labor force during the 1980s.
Productive talent is sitting on the sidelines. Potential workers, ...

Although many economic indicators are heading in a positive direction, last week's December jobs report highlighted the problem of the declining labor force participation rate, the percentage of people aged 16 and over who choose to work or look for work.

The labor force participation rate moved back to 62.8 percent from its November level of 63 percent. In 2007, before the recession, 66 percent of Americans were in the labor force. Today's levels are equivalent to 1978, before the Reagan Revolution and the movement of women ...

As the House of Representatives ponders whether to follow the Senate's example and extend unemployment benefits, members might want to consider the case of North Carolina, where employment has increased and unemployment has declined from 8.8 percent to 7.4 percent in the five months following dramatic cuts in the state's unemployment ...

In his weekly video address and in a speech at the White House on Tuesday, President Obama called on Congress to extend federal emergency unemployment insurance benefits, which expired at the end of 2013.

During the recession the federal government funded the expansion of unemployment insurance benefits to 99 weeks, then 73 weeks, until the ...

The American people deserve a Christmas gift: permission to buy lower-cost, catastrophic health insurance on the exchanges. Such insurance offers protection for major illnesses but not for routine care.
Under the Affordable Care Act, only people younger than 30 are allowed to buy such insurance. But President Obama has allowed some others to ...

One might think that the qualification to become a governor of the Federal Reserve Board is to be an eminent economist. But the real qualification is a professional optimist. Here's why.

The FOMC released a statement on December 18 which said "The committee expects that, with appropriate policy accommodation, economic growth will pick up from its recent pace..." ...

Paying people more is not as simple as it looks. Sunday’s New York Times magazine will feature an article called “Supersize My Wage
” by economics reporter Annie Lowrey. She concludes, “Unlike any other form of wealth redistribution, raising the minimum wage is basically cost-free to Washington. If it won’t hurt the unemployment rate — as ...

President Obama has been taking lessons from Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. Just as Putin shut down the RIA Novosti news agency on Dec. 9, two new administration rules misuse the government to punish enemies and reward friends.

Over Thanksgiving the Internal Revenue Service issued regulations to silence Obama's tax-exempt political ...

As if the Internal Revenue Service did not have enough to do with administering Obamacare, President Obama wants to give it another job: regulating the free speech of his political opponents, while leaving the political activities of the president's friends untouched.The new proposed IRS regulations were placed in the Federal Register the ...

On Wednesday, President Obama declared that “increasing inequality is most pronounced in our country, and it challenges the very essence of who we are as a people.”

But measuring inequality is not simple. Should income be measured before the government removes taxes, or after? Should income include government transfers such as food ...

The advantage of working at Princeton is that when you have a question, someone has an answer. So when Princeton professor Paul Krugman wonders how unemployment insurance causes unemployment, as he did in his New York Times column on Monday, he could walk from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs over to the ...

Calls to increase the minimum wage are rising.

Financial Times columnist Edward Luce wrote that raising the minimum wage “would inject a much-needed stimulus into the anemic recovery without involving a dollar of taxpayer money.”

The New York Times has published columns by Princeton professor Paul Krugman and University of ...

When Dickens wrote in the 19th Century, characters such as Scrooge paid their employees next to nothing and gave little break for Christmas, and nothing at all for a Christmas bonus.American employers are not Scrooges in the 21st Century. All but three percentof U.S. employees make more than the federal minimum wage. Employers often give ...

Thursday is Thanksgiving. Amid economic hard times, millions of Americans are thankful to have a job.
Some self-anointed worker centers think that some employees should not be thankful. In addition to Black Friday demonstrations outside Walmart, they are organizing protests on Dec. 5 to try to get restaurant workers to strike.
Their goal is a ...

The odds of getting into one of the top American universities are about 1 in 10. American workers view Walmart in the same way as high school seniors view American colleges: last year 5 million Americans applied to Walmart for 500,000 jobs. These are highly ...

The Environmental Protection Agency finally saw sense on Friday and announced a reduction in the amount of ethanol that refiners are required to blend into gasoline in 2014. Will Congress show equal sense and allow the wind tax credit to expire at the end of 2013?

With budget negotiators striving to meet their December 13 deadline to avoid another government shutdown on January 15, they are looking for suitable tax loopholes to close. One candidate is the wind production credit, which subsidizes more expensive energy and makes ...

After the Nov. 8 oil tank train derailment in Alabama, it is time to reconsider the approval of new pipeline construction in North America.

Pipelines are the safest way of transporting oil and natural gas, and we need more of them, without delay.

Every time I write this, the rail industry attacks me. Then, three or four months later, ...

The wave of health insurance policy cancellations reminds me of the gas lines in 1979. Once a week I took a gas break instead of a lunch break so I could fill up my car with gas. Lines were shorter in the middle of the day than in the morning or evening.

Then Ronald Reagan was elected president. He took away President Carter's price and regional allocation controls on gasoline, and the lines vanished overnight. ...

Forget the broken healthcare.gov website and the skyrocketing price of health insurance. Will the courts end Obamacare by disallowing subsidies on federal exchanges?

Judge James R. Spencer of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia in Richmond agreed to rule speedily on whether people who sign up for health insurance in ...

The New York Times, trying to smooth the way to Janet Yellen's confirmation as chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, is extolling the virtues of inflation. Yellen, who favors a looser monetary policy that could lead to inflation, faces tough questions from the Senate Banking Committee in hearings next month.In a front-page ...

Legal challenge could knock out the federal exchanges. The administration is interpreting the Affordable Care Act in extraordinary ways, and the courts are beginning to take note.

On Tuesday Judge Paul Friedman of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia said he would rule on whether people who sign up for health insurance on federal exchanges in 34 states can get subsidies. ...

What will Janet Yellen, the nominated chairman of the Federal Reserve, do to fix the economy?

Not much, it appears, if Congress remains dysfunctional and she is wedded to accommodative monetary policy and a continuation of Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke's regime. ...

The old joke goes: "If you can't win on the merits of your argument, attack your opponent." Thus Republicans in Congress are accused of having bad ideas without the slightest examination of their ideas, but simply based on assertion that Republicans are ignoble. Such ad hominem attacks seem to be the gist of many recent attacks on ...

With the closure of the government on Tuesday, President Obama on Monday said he is open to fresh ideas on health care reform.

"So here's the bottom line," said Obama in a speech from the White House Briefing Room, "I'm always willing to work with anyone of either party to make sure the Affordable Care Act works better, to make sure our government works better.... I've demonstrated this time and ...

Although the stated objective of the Affordable Care Act -- Obamacare -- was universal health insurance, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office projected in May that the number of uninsured will settle at 30 million from 2016 onwards, down from 55 million today.

One reason is that millions of low-income Americans will be unable to ...

Now that Harvard professor Larry Summers has taken himself out of the running for chairman of the Federal Reserve, all eyes are on Fed Vice Chairman Janet Yellen, the current favorite.

With her appointment, President Obama could congratulate himself on appointing the first female Fed chairwoman. ...

If you were around before 1990, you might never have heard of the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, much less have watched the spectacle of his selection. American schoolchildren do not learn lists of the names of Fed chairman, who were selected invisibly and generally served in obscurity. Fed chairman in prior times knew their place in ...

On Friday at 8:30 a.m., the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) will publish the first government snapshot of August’s economic activity — the monthly employment report.

Headline news will be the unemployment rate, forecast to stay at 7.4%, and the number of nonfarm payroll jobs created, forecast at 180,000, up from 162,000 in July. The details inside the BLS’s 25 tables are especially important this week because the Fed is considering ...

This Labor Day, many Americans are enjoying their last summer weekend at the beach or mountains — and the traffic jams that accompany these holiday weekends.

Yet with cars becoming more fuel efficient, and miles driven declining — 2.938 trillion miles traveled in 2012 compared with 3.031 trillion in 2007 — federal and state fuel tax revenues are increasingly insufficient to build new roads and maintain existing ones. Electric ...

GLOUCESTER, MASS. — There is nothing like the beauty of the Massachusetts coastline of Gloucester, incorporated in 1642, north of Boston. But marring the skyline are three huge windmills that tower above the Gloucester harbor and beach.

The three windmills were erected in 2012. One, with a 2.5 megawatt turbine, was set up by Varian Semiconductor. It cost $8 million to build, with 30 percent of that total covered by the federal government under President Obama’s economic stimulus program. ...

Ordinarily Americans view a strike as workers demanding higher pay or better benefits. This Thursday, Americans will see a different kind of strike at fast food restaurants around the country, planned not by restaurant employees, but by paid political activists organized by the Service Employees ...

When Congress returns from recess on September 9, sensible immigration reform should be a priority. The House Judiciary Committee has voted out bills to make it easier for foreign skilled workers and agricultural workers to obtain visas.

These may not be perfect bills. The language on prevailing wages needs removal or modification, for example. But they are a step in the right direction. It would be an improvement if the House passed them and if the Senate adopted similar language. ...

Are national minimum wage protests at fast-food chains a spontaneous reaction to the slow-growing economy and sluggish labor market?

No, these protests are organized by a campaign called Fast Food Forward, led by the worker center New York Communities for Change, funded in part by unions, including the Services Employees International Union. Read about New York Communities for Change. ...

President Obama visited Chattanooga, Tenn., on Tuesday for another in his series of speeches to fix the economy. Obama is traveling the country, with stops in Illinois, Florida and now Tennessee, to make yet another case for government spending, which he calls "investment."

Alternately boasting and complaining about the economy, Obama proposed restructuring the corporate tax reform and using the revenues to fund middle-class "investments," such as spending on education, infrastructure, and health care. ...

Would you like to know where to find a succinct statement of liberals’ climate change policy? It is not at the White House website nor the Environmental Protection Agency’s website. Instead, it can be found in a memo distributed by Kenneth Berlin of the “Energy & Environment ...

With an apparent stall in global warming, the focus among environmentalists has switched to "climate change," perhaps to justify President Obama's new environmental regulatory initiatives.

On Thursday the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works holds a hearing entitled "Climate Change: It's Happening Now." ...

Full plan should be delayed for a year. The Act mandates a one-size-fits all, overly generous plan, with required free preventive care, mandatory mental health and drug abuse coverage, free contraceptives, and no lifetime maximum. Combined with the requirement that people can sign up anytime, health insurance becomes very expensive, with the ...

Although the newly-passed Senate immigration bill requires Congress to appropriate $46 billion for border security, its wage provisions encourage illegal immigration by setting wages for immigrants above their true wage. If employers are required to pay immigrants inflated wages, firms will be tempted to hire ...

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is considering tapering off monetary accommodation, and European and Chinese economies are weakening. American stock markets are on the skids. The American economy shows many signs of fatigue.

So what should President Obama do? Surely, he should take steps to help the economy, such as by loosening costly regulations that keep Americans from working and firms from expanding. ...

Commentary: America should reform entitlements, not immigration. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has calculated that the immigration reform bill under consideration in the Senate, S.744, would lower the federal budget deficit by $197 billion over the coming decade, and by $700 billion in 2024 to ...

Just in time for the 50th anniversary of the Equal Pay Act comes the publication of a new book by American Enterprise Institute scholar Christina Hoff Sommers, Freedom Feminism: Its Surprising History and Why It Matters Today.

President Obama should read this book. Last week in the Rose Garden, at an event celebrating the Equal Pay Act, he once again repeated the myth that women earn 77 cents on a man's dollar. ...

Ahead of the Friday release of the Labor Department’s May jobs numbers, the liberal Roosevelt Institute held a conference on the subject of job creation.

The Institute, whose goal is to promote the values of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his wife Eleanor, offered a menu of government programs as part of its Rediscovering Government initiative. I was invited to provide a perspective from the private sector. ...

With the House Agriculture Committee voting to trim the $80 billion food stamp program by $3 billion a year, or 2.5 percent, the New York Times is predictably outraged.

"If anything, Washington should be allocating more money to address tremendous unmet needs," the paper's Tuesday editorial trumpeted. ...

We hear it over and over again: the myth of the wage gap. In Tuesday’s presidential debate, Katherine Fenton asked President Obama what he intended to do about "women making only 72 percent of what their male counterparts earn."

Just one problem: Women make about 95 percent of what their male counterparts earn, if the male counterparts are in the same job with the same experience. ...