According to Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, we live in a time "profoundly different from the typical postwar business cycle." Our experiences have "defied conventional wisdom" and mark "veritable shifts in the tectonic plates of technology." Evidently, the law of supply and demand has...

Survey responses make it clear the minimum wage can be raised. The question now is how high can it be raised before serious employment consequences occur.

To what extent have small businesses hired former welfare recipients and what might induce them to hire more? Do small businesses change their hiring and employment practices in response to an increase in the minimum wage? The Levy Institute conducts a national survey of small firms in many...

Recent economic commentary has been filled with "D" words: deficits, debt, deflation, depreciation. Deficits--budget and trade--are of the greatest concern and may be on an unsustainable course, as federal and national debt grow without limit. The United States is already the world's largest...

Growing government budget surpluses combined with growing trade deficits have generated record private sector deficits. Unless households continue to reduce their saving--creating an increasingly unsustainable debt burden--the impetus that has driven the expansion will evaporate.

Hospitals have been squeezed by the Balanced Budget Act; the uninsured population is still on the rise; long-term care is paid for largely by welfare grants. The nation's flawed structure of health care finance ultimately will adversely affect the quality of care for all.

The problem is that the payers of health care-government and employers alike-are in open revolt against costs they never anticipated would become so high. Payers succeeded for a time in limiting increases to rises in the general price level. But it is one thing to remedy the most glaring...

A federal government surplus has finally been achieved, and it has been met with pronouncements that it is a great gift for the future and with arguments about what to do with it. However, the surplus will be short-lived, it will depress economic growth, and, in any case, surpluses cannot be...

Tax reform that reduces tax rates on capital income, no matter how successful it is in reducing the user cost of capital, will have at best minimal effects on capital formation and output and therefore on the growth of the U.S. economy.

The search for the solution to the problems faced by the Social Security system should focus not on how to amend OASDI but on how best to achieve faster long-term economic growth. Achieving such growth is better left to the purview of fiscal and monetary policy, not the OASDI system.