In his recent commentary in the Financial Times, Kenneth Rogoff, a professor of economics at Harvard, made a strong case for the importance of education in heading off future crises in capitalism: Societies need to find ways to make adult education, including economic and financial literacy, far more available and far more compelling. If voters are uninformed and easily swayed towards demagogues peddling short-term ill-considered policies, there is little hope for righting the course of capitalist economies. As someone who has spoken to all kinds of people in the wake …
So you think you’re free? Thanks to big government spending and exploding debt, the United States — and indeed the world — is less economically free today than it was a year ago, according to the 18th annual Index of Economic Freedom, released yesterday by The Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street Journal. Economic freedom — the ability of individuals to control the fruits of their labor and pursue their dreams — is central to prosperity around the world. Heritage and The Wall Street Journal measure economic freedom by studying its pillars: the …
As the economy continues to struggle, a new report highlights ways the government may be making things worse by imposing bigger burdens on business. Our new video breaks down the facts and highlights the impact of this creeping government red tape. While these costs are often invisible, they are nevertheless very real for taxpayers. Heritage’s James Gattuso and Diane Katz explain:
Last week the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a Washington-based free-market advocacy group, filed a petition with the U.S. Supreme Court to review the 1998 tobacco Master Settlement Agreement on the grounds it violates federal antitrust laws and is unconstitutional. The tobacco MSA is the result of 46 state attorneys general striking a deal with the four major tobacco companies in 1998 to settle Medicaid lawsuits over tobacco-related health care costs. Tobacco companies agreed to fork over $246 billion to the states over 25 years and adhere to restrictions on advertising, marketing …
There simply is no way to avoid thinking and, perhaps, even starting the analysis of economic policy except from a set of principles. Whether it be labor, investment, trade, or a host of other pieces of our national economic policy; analysts only will be able to understand policy change if they have a foundation of guiding principles. No one would see a physician who was untrained in the mechanics and chemistry of the human body. It would be somewhat disconcerting if physicians were surprised by the presence of body temperature …
The United States is experiencing tough economic times and high levels of unemployment, leading to a dramatic increase in the number of young people taking unpaid internships to advance their careers. Unfortunately, current laws say that many unpaid internships are actually illegal because these positions do not qualify for the status of being “unpaid” as defined by the Fair Labor Standards Act. The requirements of what constitutes an unpaid internship should be loosened to make it legal for more students to work for free if they choose to do so, …
Just one year after President Barack Obama took office, we released the 16th edition of the Index of Economic Freedom in both Hong Kong and Washington. Once again, it provides empirical evidence that economic freedom is the pathway to prosperity. The good news is that despite the global economic crisis, the overall level of global economic freedom remained about the same. Some countries improved while others declined. The bad news is that the United States is one of the economies that declined. For the first time since we began measuring …
Three years ago the U.S. finished negotiating a free trade agreement (FTA) with Colombia that would have given American businesses reciprocal access to the Colombian market that Colombian companies have been receiving for years. Two years later, in an unprecedented move, Speaker Pelosi denied the FTA an up or down vote in the House, stripping the agreement’s “fast track” procedural protections under the law. Despite calls for action, the Obama Administration has followed suit by failing to push the agreement forward. Now Canada has swooped in to lock in an …
White House chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel wasn’t kidding when he said that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste, and according Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), it was anything but wasted. “Indeed, the period of panic that everyone was facing opened a tremendous opportunity for the left to start establishing the principles of social democracy,” Brooks said this week at The Heritage Foundation. As the recession abates, confidence slowly builds and a dynamic is born where panic is receding and anger is setting in …
Today, another burden is being placed on America’s small businesses. Effective on this date is the third installment of the increase of the minimum wage that was passed in 2007. Once again, our federal government has provided not a help, but a hindrance to our economic recovery. When the three-phase minimum wage increase was initially signed into law in May 2007, the unemployment rate was 4.5%, and when the first phase went into place, the unemployment rate was 4.6%. Today it stands at 9.5%. At a time of record deficits, …
