President Barack Obama says income inequality is “dangerous … the defining challenge of our time.” The pope is upset that capitalism causes inequality. Progressives, facing the failures of Obamacare, are eager to change the subject to America’s “wealth gap.” It’s true that today, the richest 1 percent of Americans own a third of America’s wealth. […]

There’s little debate among academic economists about the effect of minimum wages. University of California, Irvine economist David Neumark has examined more than 100 major academic studies on the minimum wage. He reports that 85 percent of the studies “find a negative employment effect on low-skilled workers.” A 1976 American Economic Association survey found that […]

In 2014, 25 to 30 million Americans with employer-provided health insurance are likely to lose it, thanks to Obamacare’s requirement that all plans cover what Washington deems “essential benefits.” Some employers will consider this unaffordable, so after their current lower-cost plans expire over the course of the year, they’ll drop coverage altogether. These 25 to […]

It took capitalism half a century to come back from the Great Depression. It’s taken socialism half that time to come back from the collapse of the Soviet Union. In New York City, avowed socialist Mayor Bill de Blasio has declared that his goal is to take “dead aim at the Tale of Two Cities” […]

“In America,” Oscar Wilde quipped, “the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience.” And they often do it in the pages of Rolling Stone. Last week, the magazine posted a mini-manifesto titled “Five Economic Reforms Millennials Should Be Fighting For.” After confirming it […]

At the London 2012 Olympics, various media outlets probed the notion of the Olympic athletes’ village being a giant bed-hopping venue — a phenomenon that not only disgusted my mother every time she heard it mentioned (which was often) but also puzzled me as a former international-level swimmer who spent every night before a race […]

Nice tan, Mr. Mayor! You came back from steamy and tropical Indonesia to a city frozen in ice and snow, where the side streets and alleys hadn’t been plowed and where schoolkids were almost sent into the worst of the cold. But Rahm Emanuel wasn’t worried. He held a Monday news conference about the cold, […]

New York’s new mayor, Bill de Blasio, in his inaugural speech, denounced people “on the far right” who “continue to preach the virtue of trickle-down economics.” According to Mayor de Blasio, “They believe that the way to move forward is to give more to the most fortunate, and that somehow the benefits will work their […]

PolitiFact has crowned the promoter in chief’s sound bite for Obamacare the “Lie of the Year” for 2013: “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it.” And let me make a prediction that among his top 10 falsehood contenders for 2014 will be a reversal of what he emphatically stated back on […]

It’s no mystery what the left intends to make its next life-or-death issue: income inequality. Liberals are all popping off about it. It’s everywhere, from Obama’s speeches to liberal think tanks to liberal reporters. It’s almost as if they were conspiring to distract us from Obamacare. Nah! On “Meet the Press,” PBS anchorwoman Judy Woodruff […]

Last week the International Business Times reported: “In their annual End of Year poll, researchers for WIN and Gallup International surveyed more than 66,000 people across 65 nations and found that 24 percent of all respondents answered that the United States ‘is the greatest threat to peace in the world today.’ Pakistan and China fell […]

It is widely accepted that Hispanics will become a larger share of the American electorate in the years to come. This is a matter of simple arithmetic. Less than one-tenth of adults counted in the 2010 Census classified themselves as “Hispanic” (a term invented by the Census Bureau for the 1970 count). But one-quarter of […]

President Obama’s mission as 2014 starts is simple: He has to distract attention from the health care debacle. Health care reform isn’t working and won’t work. So he needs to create a diversion. With his poll numbers lagging around 40 percent, he is naturally concerned to stop the erosion of his base, so he is […]

The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein has found what he thinks is a bright spot amid the gloomy Obamacare news. When you hear what he’s enthusiastic about, you’ll perhaps understand why I wonder if there is any common ground at all between liberals and conservatives. Klein reports that Obamacare’s “biggest success” is that 4 million new […]

French President Francois Hollande has been confronted by the glaring light of reality — sort of. On New Year’s Day, as his massive tax increases began taking effect, Hollande, a member of the Socialist Party, admitted that taxes in France have become “too heavy, much too heavy.” Indeed, as of Jan. 1, French households now […]