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...

The stimulus package being considered by Congress presents a once in a generation opportunity to upgrade our nation's broadband infrastructure, but only if the proposals are based on pragmatic logic rather than ideological wishful thinking.

Congress will hopefully include a sizeable investment in broadband infrastructure in the stimulus package expected...

Regardless of your political affiliation and how you feel about the election results, you will probably agree that yesterday was truly a historic day for the nation, electing for the first time an African-American president.

As Senator Obama prepares for the task of governing the nation, a key question is...

For most people, debating economic doctrines is a pastime best left to the Ph.D. economists working in government, think tanks and universities. Yet economic doctrines are at the heart of the economic policies being debated right now in the presidential campaign, in the halls of Congress, and in the current...

Recently, the World Bank published revised statistics on PPP (purchasing power parity) -- adjusted GDP--that suggest that the Chinese economy is 40 percent smaller than was previously estimated. After recently returning from two weeks in southern China, I have to say that the new picture of a poorer China did...

Congress is currently considering H.R. 811 "The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2007" which would require that all electronic voting machines used in federal elections produce a "voter verified paper audit trail." The hope is that paper audit trails would make our elections more secure by preventing certain...

Internet radio has been a rising star among innovative Web 2.0 applications. With more than 60 million American users, it surpasses many of the top Internet destinations such as Facebook, which only brings in 27 million unique visitors a month. But with mandatory broadcast fees paid to the recording...

During the Great Depression, Senator Huey Long, the populist firebrand from Louisiana, proposed his Share Our Wealth Society, a radical program of wealth redistribution from the rich to "working Americans." In announcing his plan, the Kingfish stated "let no one tell you that it is difficult to redistribute the wealth...

Last year the hot debate in telecom policy circles was over "net neutrality." This year it's over whether the United States is losing the broadband race.

At first glance, there shouldn't be much of a debate. According to the OECD, the U.S. ranks 15th among 30 OECD nations...