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An Increase in the Minimum Wage Is Long Overdue
Tweet Share on Facebook July 20, 2012 CommentNicole Woo is the director of domestic policy at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
On July 24, three years will have passed since the last increase in the federal minimum wage. It's currently stuck at $7.25 an hour, or just over $15,000 a year for a full-time worker. My colleagues at the Center for Economic and Policy Research have made a number of comparisons to show just how low that is.
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Verizon and AT&T's Internet Mugging Threatens U.S. Prosperity
Tweet Share on Facebook July 19, 2012 CommentDavid Brodwin is a cofounder and board member of American Sustainable Business Council. Follow him on Twitter at @davidbrodwin.
On the Monday before July 4, as Americans planned their holiday parties, the Internet got mugged.The assault took place at the courthouse, in broad daylight, yet aside from FreePress.net, few people noticed or cared. However, this assault threatens severe injury to the Internet and to the wonders it brings.
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Will China Be Nicer When It is Richer?
Tweet Share on Facebook July 19, 2012 CommentRobert Hahn is director of economics at the Smith School, University of Oxford and chief economist at the Legatum Institute. Peter Passell is a senior fellow at the Milken Institute and the economics editor of the Legatum Institute's Democracy Lab. They are cofounders of Regulation2point0.org, a web portal on regulatory policy.
With the Great Chinese Growth Machine apparently on the verge of downshifting, it's a good time to revisit an old argument: Can China continue to expand at near double-digit pace if the Communist Party doesn't loosen its the iron grip? Or, coming at the problem from a different direction, is the tension between a (partly) free economy and an autocratic political system in China likely to be self-resolving—that is, will growth lead to liberal government?
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Medicaid Expansion Is a Good Deal for States
Tweet Share on Facebook July 18, 2012 CommentChad Stone is chief economist at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Several state governors vow to reject a Medicaid expansion—virtually entirely federally funded—that, nation-wide, would provide healthcare coverage for about 17 million more low-income adults and children. This reaction does not follow from any cool-headed financial calculation.
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Energy Efficiency Regulations Set Dangerous Precedent
Tweet Share on Facebook July 17, 2012 CommentTed Gayer is the co-director of the Economic Studies program at the Brookings Institution. W. Kip Viscusi is a university distinguished professor of law, economics, and management at Vanderbilt University.
A recent wave of government regulations has mandated energy efficiency standards for products ranging from passenger cars and commercial vehicles, to clothes dryers, air conditioners, and light bulbs. Federal regulators tout these new rules as "greenhouse gas initiatives" with the purported aim of reducing environmental pollutants—especially those that contribute to climate change.
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Derivatives Should Be Banned From Financial Markets
Tweet Share on Facebook July 16, 2012 CommentJames Rickards is a hedge fund manager in New York City and the author of Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis from Portfolio/Penguin. Follow him on Twitter at @JamesGRickards.
The idea that the financial products known as derivatives pose a danger to the financial system is nothing new. Commentators have been pointing this out for years. Most famously, Warren Buffett referred to derivatives as "time bombs" and financial "weapons of mass destruction." Recently a complex derivatives trade caused over $5 billion in losses at J.P. Morgan.
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Breaking Down the Causes of Income Inequality
Tweet Share on Facebook July 16, 2012 CommentDavid Rosnick is an economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
Over the last several decades, inequalities in both incomes and wealth have grown substantially within the United States and in other high-income nations. In the United States, for example, the income share of just the top one half of the top 1 percent grew from 5.39 percent of the nation's income in 1979 to 13.37 percent in 2010. By contrast, over this same period the share of the bottom 90 fell from 67.65 percent to 53.74 percent.
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Obama's Tax Hike Plan Punishes Small Businesses
Tweet Share on Facebook July 13, 2012 CommentDavid Park is chairman and cofounder of Job Creators Alliance, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization based in Dallas focused on developing free market solutions to America's economic and employment challenges.
This week, President Barack Obama announced a new push to extend tax cuts for individuals who make $250,000 or less a year. These tax cuts were enacted during the Bush administration, and are set to expire at the end of the year. While the White House would like you to believe this is an effort with good intentions to help protect the middle class, it is merely an attempt to distract tax payers from recent bad economic news, this plan will ultimately harm—not help—the middle class.
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Networking, Social Media, and the Six Degrees of Separation
Tweet Share on Facebook July 13, 2012 CommentLisa Chau is the assistant director of Public Relations at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth.
Frigyes Karinthy's "six degrees of separation" concept suggests that any two people are connected by six steps of connection or fewer. Mark Granovetter's "theory on the strength of weak ties" advocates focusing on weak ties—people farther out on one's networks—for greater mobility. The intersection of these two models of thought can be molded into a powerful strategy for leveraging relationships, especially when compounded with social media. Like my previous article, my intent here is to understand tactics people can leverage to find and land jobs in a struggling economy.
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Bickering Over Affordable Care Act Gets Us Nowhere
Tweet Share on Facebook July 12, 2012 CommentDavid Brodwin is a cofounder and board member of American Sustainable Business Council. Follow him on Twitter at @davidbrodwin.
Although the Supreme Court has approved President Barack Obama's healthcare reform legislation, the fight over its future rages on. In the name of fiscal conservatism, opponents of the Affordable Care Act promise to "repeal and replace" it with something they can't or won't explain. They aim to preserve the changes that Americans clearly want while blocking any mechanism that could pay for the changes. This is both bad economics and dishonest leadership.
