A big puzzle looms over the U.S. economy: Friday’s jobs report tells us that the unemployment rate has fallen to 6.7% from a peak of 10% at the height of the Great Recession. But at the same time, only 63.2% of Americans 16 or older are participating in the labor force, which, while up a […]
President Obama’s economic proposals in Tuesday’s State of the Union address were a disappointment. His ideas — free community college, an enhanced tax credit for child care and higher taxes on high-income earners and large financial institutions — failed to go beyond mere talking points. With no chance of engaging the Republicans, they will surely […]
If social policy were medicine, and countries were the patients, the United States today would be a post-surgical charge under observation after an ambitious and previously untested transplant operation. Surgeons have grafted a foreign organ — the European welfare state — into the American body. The transplanted organ has thrived — in fact, it has […]
The Medicare and Social Security Trustees Report came out this week, and the main story is mostly that the reported improvements to Medicare aren’t likely to materialize and Medicare and Social Security are still insolvent — in other words, without reforms, these programs simply will cease to work the way they’re supposed to in the relatively near […]