President Obama has presided over a terrible jobs market. Unemployment is more than two-percentage points higher today than the White House claimed it would be if the so-called stimulus was enacted. Even more worrisome, the employment-population ratio seems to have permanently fallen, which is bad news for economic performance since our output is a function […]

Switzerland’s left-wing party has instigated a referendum for November 24 that asks voters to limit pay ranges so that a company wouldn’t be able to pay top employees more than 12 times what they’re paying their lowest-level employees. I talked with Neil Cavuto about this proposal and made several (hopefully) cogent points. Since Swiss voters […]

I routinely (some would say repetitively) argue that the burden of government spending is a drag on the economy because labor and capital are being misallocated via the political process. My message is that we need to reduce the size of the public sector, even if we do it in a very gradual way by […]

The only sustainable way of achieving more prosperity and higher living standards is to increase the quality and quantity of labor and capital in the economy. This may sound like boring econo-speak, but labor and capital are the two “factors of production” and our ability to consume is limited by what we can produce. That’s […]

The Department of Labor has issued its monthly employment report and the item that will attract the most attention is that the unemployment rate marginally increased to 7.3 percent. That number is worthy of some attention, but I think it distracts attention from a far more important set of data. What we should be more […]

Perhaps because he wants to divert attention from the slow-motion train wreck of Obamacare, the President is signaling that he will renew his efforts to throw more people into the unemployment line. Needless to say, that’s not how the White House would describe the President’s proposal to increase the minimum wage, but that’s one of […]

I’m currently in the Faroe Islands, a relatively unknown and semi-autonomous part of Denmark located in the North Atlantic. Sort of like Greenland, but too small to appear on most maps. I’m in this chilly archipelago for a speech to the annual meeting of the Faroese People’s Party. According to Wikipedia, “the party is supportive […]

At the beginning of the year, I was asked whether Europe’s fiscal crisis was over. Showing deep thought and characteristic maturity, my response was “HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA, are you ;@($&^#’% kidding me?” But I then shared specific reasons for pessimism, including the fact that many European nations had the wrong response to the fiscal crisis. With a […]

Keynesian economics is the perpetual motion machine of the left. You build a model that assumes government spending is good for the economy and you assume that there are zero costs when the government diverts money from the private sector. With that type of model, you then automatically generate predictions that bigger government will “stimulate’ […]

The Washington metropolitan area has become America’s wealthiest region because trillions of dollars are taken every year from the productive sector of the economy and then divvied up by the politicians, bureaucrats, lobbyists and interest groups that benefit from federal largess. But there’s always an appetite in Washington for even more money.  Former Senator Kent […]