Economists may not agree on much, but we all agree that economic output is a function of capital and labor. Ask a Keynesian, a Marxist, an Austrian, a monetarist, or any economist, and they’ll all agree that living standards are determined by the quality and quantity of these two factors of production. So it should […]

It’s not something I should admit since I work at a think tank, which is based on the idea that substantive analysis can impact public policy, but I sometimes think humor and anecdotes are very effective in helping people understand issues. On the topic of unemployment insurance, for instance, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn […]

In some sense, the President is fortunate. I predicted a long time ago that he would win re-election if the unemployment rate was under 8 percent. Well, the new numbers just came out and the joblessness rate is 7.9 percent. So even though his stimulus failed, and even though his class-warfare tax policy is like […]

That’s a clunky title for this post, but I couldn’t think of any other way of expressing the potential political impact of a very muddled employment situation. Let’s start with the obvious. The White House is very happy about the recent numbers showing that the unemployment rate has dropped to 7.8 percent. And since I […]

There have been lots of studies showing that there’s no benefit to job training programs. People who sign up with these government schemes are not more likely to either get jobs or to earn more money. Heck, even the New York Times was forced to acknowledge that these programs are a costly failure. To really […]

If it wasn’t for the fact that so many people are suffering and being seduced into empty lives of government dependency (symbolized by Julia, the world’s most disappointing daughter), I might feel sorry for President Obama. He promised unemployment would never climb above 8 percent if Congress squandered $800 billion on a Keynesian stimulus scheme. […]

I’ve done a few comparisons of economic performance under Reagan and Obama, sometimes using the interactive data from the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank. And I’ve done a few TV interviews on the same subject. But something was very different in this interview on the Fox morning show. I was asked to respond to the Obama […]

Can we finally all agree that Keynesian economics is a flop? The politicians in Washington flushed about $800 billion down the toilet and we got nothing in exchange except for anemic growth and lots of people out of work. Indeed, we’re getting to the point where the monthly employment reports from the Labor Department must […]

Remember back in 2009, when President Obama and his team told us that we needed to squander $800 billion on a so-called stimulus package. The crowd in Washington was quite confident that Keynesian spending was going to save the day, even though similar efforts had failed for Hoover and Roosevelt in the 1930s, for Japan […]

The Labor Department just released its monthly employment report and the White House is probably not happy. There are several key bits of data in the report, such as the unemployment rate, net job creation, and employment-population ratio. At best, the results are mediocre. The unemployment rate generally gets the most attention, and that was […]