Opponents of the ACA have labeled the health care bill a jobs killer. It seems implausible that the bill could be expected to have much impact on employment except among the relatively small number of firms that are near the 50-worker cutoff. However the bill does provide a clear incentive to...

Americans pay far higher prices for prescription drugs than do people in other wealthy countries. The reason that other countries spend so much less on drugs is that their governments negotiate prices with the pharmaceutical industry. The United States government could adopt the same approach...

When Congress was debating the Medicare drug benefit in 2003, there were many who advocated that Medicare provide the benefit as part of the traditional hospital insurance program. This was expected to save money both due to lower administrative costs and also as result of Medicare’s ability...

One outcome of the TARP and other bank rescue efforts following the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September of 2008 is that the United States has essentially formalized a commitment to a “too big to fail” (TBTF) policy for major banks. This paper uses data from the FDIC on the relative cost...

The unemployment rate is expected to average 10.2 percent for 2010, 9.1 percent for 2011, and 7.3 percent for 2012. With this in mind, this Issue Brief describes a job sharing tax credit, designed to provide a quick and substantial boost to the economy. It would use tax dollars to pay firms to...

There is widespread concern that the United States and the rest of the world are descending into a round of protectionism and a trade war reminiscent of what the world experienced in the Great Depression. Such concerns are both overblown and misplaced. In the short term, the main concern in the...

Many proponents of conservative fiscal policies talk of the budget deficit as being a matter of intergenerational equality. However, this paper shows the younger generations (and those yet to be born) will contribute more to the deficit than older generations. This analysis uses data from the...

The strong rise in the U.S. stock market since the spring and the return to positive economic growth in the third quarter of this year have created a consensus among economists that the Great Recession is very likely over. Unfortunately, the end of the official recession will have little visible...

The huge gap between the cost of health care in the United States and the cost in other countries with comparable health care outcomes suggests the potential for substantial gains from trade. This paper describes one mechanism for taking advantage of these gains – through a globalization of...

There has been a serious push in policy circles to cut Social Security benefits for near- and/or current retirees. The argument for such cuts has been based on the deficits in the federal budget; the finances of the Social Security program have been at most a secondary consideration. However,...