Economic Policy

What if the reasonable growth, low unemployment, and low inflation of the last few years are in fact the vindication of Keynesian theory about consumption spending? And what if this spending has been driven not by government but by the stock market run-up? And what if the stock market collapses? 

Several leading Republicans now claim that a flat tax can lower most taxpayers’ burden, close loopholes, and avoid revenue shortfalls. Wrong on all counts.

A higher percentage of Americans are working than at any time since World War II. But policy-makers could wreck a dawning era of high employment.

If California’s present is the nation’s future, then the Golden State’s split-level prosperity is an ominous social indicator.

A reply to Robert Kuttner, “Peddling Krugman,” September-October 1996.

As long as the big choices in macroeconomic policy are off the table, other efforts to raise living standards will not make much difference.

It seemed appropriate to begin my series of modest screeds with a short pre- snake person analysis of where power is moving to in America. Here’s who’s losing it: Giant corporations and their CEOs. They’ve made money in the current expansion, but they’re losing clout. Vast industrial- age bureaucracies can’t move fast enough. All are […]

T he Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations (ACIR) is probably one of the least known victims of federal downsizing, but the effect of its elimination at the end of September 1996 was significant. Without the ACIR, local, state, and federal officials have less contact with each other, and there is a shortage of data about […]

N ewt Gingrich thinks Americans need a new frontier to explore. He also believes in paying bounties to promote public objectives. Hence the proposal prepared at his invitation by space entrepreneur Robert Zubrin for a federal bounty of $20 billion payable to the first private organization that puts someone on Mars and brings that man […]