News
Politico | The war on inequality … may take awhile
Coming up next: President Barack Obama solves inequality? Don’t hold your breath. He’s building his new agenda around an issue that has been in the making for decades: economic inequality. It’s expected to be the major theme of Tuesday’s State of the Union address, and when Capitol Hill doesn’t act on his ideas, he says he’ll use a “pen and phone” strategy to do what he can without Congress.
FOX News | NABE survey: Businesses expect stronger performance this year vs 2013, but hiring still anemic
Businesses expect their companies to perform better this year but that optimism still isn't translating into a push to hire more workers, according to a new survey from the National Association for Business Economics.
CNN Money | Buckle up! 2014 will be a bumpy ride
Get ready for a volatile year. Last week's stock market gyrations and currency swings are a sign of things to come as central banks wean investors off cheap money.
FOX Business | Government Regulations Drowning New England Fisheries?
One well-seasoned commercial fisherman says Federal regulations are drowning New England fisheries.
Market Watch | How much gas in economy’s tank? Let’s see
If the U.S. economic engine is ready to rev faster in 2014, this is the week we should learn how much fuel is in the gas tank.
CNBC | Making the rich poorer isn't the American Dream: Summers
Making an impassioned social commentary that seemed to cut against fellow Democrats, Larry Summers said that making people poorer, "even the very rich," in the name of balancing the scales of income inequality in America is a destructive course of action.
Econ Comments & Analysis
Politico | The new faces of food stamps
In a first, working-age people now make up the majority in U.S. households that rely on food stamps - a switch from a few years ago, when children and the elderly were the main recipients.
WSJ | The Other Kind of Inequality
The problem with the Democrats' new war on inequality ("the defining challenge of our time," says President Obama ) is that there are two kinds of growing inequality—and the Democrats are attacking the wrong one.
Real Clear Markets | To Increase College Grads, Obama Should Eliminate Pell Grants
Pell Grants are federal funds provided to college students from low-income families. Since its start in 1973 the program has grown both in the number of students receiving grants and the amount of each grant. Today over nine million students receive Pell Grants worth up to almost $6,000 a year. Yet if the federal government really wants to boost American human capital and improve college outcomes one of the best things it could do is eliminate the Pell Grant program completely.
Washington Times | Restoring the American dream
We can expect President Obama’s big speech Tuesday night to be full of his usual class-warfare bloviation about the “lack of upward mobility” being the “defining problem of our time.” He wants more and bigger government, so he defines problems in a way that demands another federal solution.
Blogs
Heritage Foundation | U.S. Could Learn From Hong Kong About Economic Freedom
My previous column focused on why the United States is no longer among the top 10 nations listed in the annual “Index of Economic Freedom.” It’s important to put this in a larger context and explain why it matters.
Library of Economics | Poverty and Income Inequality are Separate Issues
What matters is not whether inequality increases but whether people of all income levels are doing better.
Heritage Foundation | You Can’t Have Income Equality Without Economic Freedom
For all of the ideas President Barack Obama will likely mention in the course of this election year on ways to reduce income inequality, don’t expect for him to mention the one that has actually been proven empirically to work: jobs.
