Looking at labor markets, my biggest concern is the drop in labor force participation. The data from the Labor Department on the employment-population ratio, for instance, suggest a permanent reduction in the share of the population that is working. And since economic output and living standards ultimately depend on the quality and quantity of labor and capital […]

Early last year, with the sequester about to begin, President Obama stated that “these cuts are not smart, they are not fair, they will hurt our economy, they will add hundreds of thousands of Americans to the unemployment rolls.” He made this statement because Keynesian theorysays government spending can boost “aggregate demand” and goose an economy. So less government spending obviously […]

Self awareness is supposed to be a good thing, so I’m going to openly acknowledge that I have an unusual fixation on the size of government. I don’t lose a wink of sleep thinking about deficits, but I toss and turn all night fretting about the overall burden of government spending. My peculiar focus on the […]

What’s the best state in America? I’m not sure I can answer that broad question, but I can address the more narrow issue of which state has the most economic freedom. Last month, for instance, I shared some data from the Canada-based Fraser Institute which showed that South Dakota was America’s most laissez-faire state, followed by Tennessee, Delaware, […]

A bunch of well-connected rich people and government officials are descending upon Switzerland for the annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos. This upsets many people, and perhaps with some justification. After all, bad things often happen when big business and big government intersect. But some folks reflexively think that wealth is bad and they would like us to believe […]

According to the most recent numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate has dropped to 6.7 percent. Is this good news? Well, it’s depends on your benchmark. Compared to France’s anemic economyand double-digit levels of unemployment, America is in decent shape. But if you use data from the Minneapolis Federal Reserve to compare the current business cycle […]

My favorite Heritage Foundation publication (other than…ahem…my studies on government spending and the flat tax) is the annual Index of Economic Freedom. Like the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World and the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report, the Index is a broad measure of liberty to engage in voluntary exchange in a system of secure property rights and honest government. […]

If you ask an economist about the difference between capitalism and socialism, you’ll probably get a boring answer about the size of government, the impact on incentives, and the power of the state. Or maybe you’ll get a nit-picking answer, sort of like when I explained that Obama technically isn’t a socialist. That’s why it’s sometimes […]

Washington is in the middle of another debate about redistributing money. But that’s hardly newsworthy. Politics, after all, is basically a never-ending racket in which insiders buy votes and accumulate power with other people’s money. The current debate about extending unemployment benefits is remarkable, though (at least from an economic perspective), because certain politicians want to give people money on […]

Not counting humor-oriented pieces such as this and this, it’s been nearly a month since I’ve written about Obamacare. To make up for this oversight, today we’re going to look at a way out of the Obamacare mess. But the goal isn’t simply to repeal the President’s bad policy. That merely gets us back to where we were in 2009. […]