In his State of the Union Address president Obama proposed that Congress increase the minimum wage to $9.00 per hour.

Almost immediately a chorus of opposition based on neoclassical economics emerged, arguing that such a change would kill job creation. As former Bush Administration economist Greg Mankiw notes, "there is...

Everyone who's anyone is publishing manifestos, blogs, e-books, and the like, warning that innovation and growth is over. Economists Tyler Cowen and Robert Gordon have received notoriety for asserting that stagnation is the new norm. The American Enterprise Institute worries that "The Computer Revolution is Already Over."...

The new meme is that the robots are coming, and while they are not the Arnold Schwarzenegger "life terminator," they are the jobs terminator. As MIT professors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee assert in their book Race Against the Machine, workers are "losing the race against the machine, a fact...

Throughout the 2012 election cycle, China and Iran have dominated the foreign policy discussion. But after Election Day, policymakers will need to address a looming threat to American innovation and jobs: India, whose recent troubling mercantilist trade practices have set off alarm bells, as U.S. and European firms vie for...

As the Presidential campaign intensifies, we are hearing a lot of charges and counter-charges about what caused the Great Recession, what the federal government should or should not have done, and whether we need more stimulus or spending cuts. That's absolutely the wrong debate. What we need is a debate...

January 2013 will not only see the inauguration of a President, it could mean massive federal budget cuts through what is known as the sequestration, which because of the Budget Control Act, will lead to mandatory cuts in discretionary spending to achieve $1.2 trillion in savings from 2013-2021, unless Congress...

The great 19th Century author and poet Robert Louis Stevenson was known to have once said, "Everybody, sooner or later, sits down to a banquet of consequences."

Amid sharp differences on how to jumpstart our nation's economy, we've lost sight of a direct and near-term threat to our economic well-being:...

As you read this, the United States is in a race with other countries for leadership of the rapidly growing clean energy economy. Fueled by the potential for economic growth and job creation, countries are aggressively trying to build competitive advantage in the development and production of low-carbon technologies. But...

In the 2000s, U.S. manufacturing suffered its worst performance in American history. Not only did America lose 5.7 million manufacturing jobs, but the decline as a share of total jobs (33 percent) exceeded the rate of loss in the Great Depression.

Despite this unprecedented negative performance, most economists, pundits...

Why can't we create jobs the way we used to? Despite nearly a trillion dollars' worth of tax breaks and investments in a stimulus package, interest rates as low as they can go, auto bailouts, bank bailouts, "quantitative easing," and public and private sector leaders' calls for optimism, the official...

The Obama Administration is wisely moving forward with a landmark trade agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). With origins in the Bush Administration, the TPP would increase regional economic integration between the United States and eight other Asia-Pacific nations: Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam. The...

When President Obama, in his State of the Union, called on Congress to join with him to, "get rid of the loopholes. Level the playing field. And use the savings to lower the corporate tax rate for the first time in 25 years -- without adding to our deficit," he...

The following is a guest post written by Stephen Ezell, Senior Analyst, Information Technology and Innovation Foundation

As it's becoming clearer every day that innovation is the central driver of economic growth, more and more countries are trying to be innovation leaders. Unfortunately, in that quest all too many countries...

If you want to understand why we haven't made any measurable progress on energy and climate change for the last 30 years, there's no better place to look than the visceral partisan reaction to Bill Gates' recent call for major federal investment in energy innovation.

Gates has been speaking...

Attend any policy discussion in Washington that deals with education and the standard line you will hear is "the American K-12 system is a failure, but thank God we still have the world's greatest higher ed system." Let me suggest that this is fundamentally wrong. Higher ed is failing almost...

Notwithstanding the Tea Party fear mongering, there is a lot of trepidation these days about America drifting toward socialism and the growth of government. (Put aside the fact that it is not true. Aside from health care, the huge government interventions over the last 18 months were isolated emergency actions...

In the last few years a troubling development has emerged in U.S. telecom and Internet policy. Network policy didn't used to be highly partisan; emblematic of this is the fact that the 1996 Telecommunications Act was passed along bipartisan lines. Increasingly, however, the dialogue over networking policy has become shrill,...

The following is a guest post written by Daniel Castro, Senior Analyst, Information Technology and Innovation Foundation

Would the U.S. government turn a blind eye to the theft of hundreds of thousands of GM vehicles each year? Of course not. Yet, large-scale theft occurs every day on the...

Guest post by Daniel Castro, Senior Analyst, Information Technology and Innovation Foundation

The recent disclosure of a confidential Congressional document has at least one congressman calling for a ban on peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing software, but a closer look at the problem reveals that this effort would merely be treating...

President-elect Obama made his campaign about change and promises to do the same with government. One area to start is with the proposed stimulus package.

Already he has said this one will be different. His transition team released a statement yesterday that they were going to ban all earmarks...