Economic Policy News

If you were to rank all the countries of the world based on their level of economic freedom, you'd think the United States would be a shoo-in for first place, right? Surely we would be at least somewhere in the top five. We're not. We're not even in the top 10. Because this isn't a…

The White House is slated to release its budget request for fiscal year 2016 next Monday, ostensibly kicking off the budget season for Congress. This year, Congress can do much in the way of improving the state of the military by increasing the defense budget to $584 billion. A recently published report, lays out the…

Several days before the White House release of the fiscal year 2016 budget, the Pentagon leaked its budget request totaling $585 billion. The Department of Defense budget includes $534 billion for the base budget and $51 billion for the overseas contingency operation account, an emergency supplemental that is exempt from the spending caps established in…

There is no single formula for overcoming challenges to economic development and maintaining economic dynamism, but one thing is clear: Around the globe, governments that respect and promote economic freedom provide greater opportunities for innovation, progress and human empowerment. The 2015 Index of Economic Freedom, released today, tracks policy developments affecting economic freedom across the…

It was 40 years ago this month that two of President Gerald Ford’s top White House advisers, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, gathered for a steak dinner at the Two Continents restaurant in Washington with Wall Street Journal editorial writer Jude Wanniski and Arthur Laffer, former chief economist at the Office of Management and Budget….

“The hope for India lies not in the exceptional Tatas or similar giants, but precisely in the hole-in-the-wall firms, in the small- and medium-size enterprises, in Ludhiana, not Jamshedpur; in the millions of small entrepreneurs who line the streets of every city with their sometimes minuscule shops and workshops. If the tendencies so evident in…

There is no doubt that the economy has languished in its recovery from the Great Recession, which ended more than five years ago. But signs are emerging that it is finally shaking free the weight of President Obama’s anti-growth policies. The latest bit of good news is that the economy grew at 5 percent in the third…

President Obama’s administration just announced a $1 billion initiative ($750 million in federal grants and the remainder from private funding) to enroll more children in government preschool programs. The new measure was announced formally at the White House Summit on Early Education last week. The push comes on the heels of President Obama’s speech on…

James Grant’s excellent new book, The Forgotten Depression: 1921: The Crash That Cured Itself, tells the story of “America’s last governmentally untreated depression.” Just prior to the Roaring Twenties, the U.S. went into a deep economic slump but soon recovered—despite no active government stimulus policies. That sort of government inaction, of course, is very different…

The Federal Reserve should stop trying to stimulate the economy for two reasons. First, the policies it has enacted so far have contributed very little to the economic recovery. Second, it likely has reached the limits of what monetary policy can do to boost the economy. The Fed’s unconventional “quantitative easing” programs have filled the…