According to all indications, the President will use tonight's State of the Union to hit on economic themes.  Look for exhortations to Congress to pass the payroll tax cut extension and other Obama Administration proposals.  With the head of the IMF now talking about a "1930's moment" in Europe, there are clearly some short term economic issues to be addressed.  But on the long term issues, what I expect to hear tonight is an expanded variation of the following: We need to increase our investments...

Traditional indices such as the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) or the Fortune 500 focus on top performers without any considerations other than their market capitalization, share price, revenue, or other 20th-century measures of business performance. But in a “Technology Economy” technology is a strategic lever, a tool to drive new business growth, protect revenue, reduce business costs, and manage risk. So let’s do an experiment and look at a “new age” Dow Jones Industrial Average – a market...

President Obama’s second State of the Union address presented a comprehensive economic philosophy for the progressive movement in this century. The mantra of the conservative movement since Reagan popularized the now-defunct concept of trickle-down economics has been clearly stated and often repeated: tax cuts, less government. Ask anyone what forms the basis of the conservative economic philosophy and those four words will be among the first you will hear. But what is the correspondingly simple...

David Leonhardt of the New York Times posted an interesting blog "The Fight Among Environmentalists"  which discussed how some environmentalists and neoclassical economists defend the idea that putting a price on carbon is the key to solving climate change.  My posted comment is here: The real issue is if one had to pick which would do more to solve climate change - a price on GHG emissions or a clean innovation policy - the answer is clear: the latter. As we stated in a recent ITIF report...

Back in the day, there were no protesters outside corporate headquarters in Silicon Valley, no one had a position on net neutrality because no one knew what is was, and technology journalists were breathlessly trying to keep pace with new technologies and companies instead of holding forth on civil rights and liberties or network engineering protocols. But ten or 15 years in the life of the Internet is a long time.  The Internet is the transformative phenomenon of our time and its role in our...

Budget deficits are emerging as one of Washington’s chief economic obsessions, with both liberal and conservative economic camps opining about the deficit’s effect on the economy. Robert Samuelson’s recent column in the Washington Post describes how the major economic doctrines—particularly Keynesian and monetarists (or supply-siders)—interpret the fiscal impact of budget deficits. Keynesians believe budget deficits (either from increased spending or reduced taxes) can stimulate the economy...

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 what kind of economic policy will characterize his administration. The last time a Democrat was elected to the White House the answer was anything but clear. For when Bill Clinton took office...

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 administration. Virtually all policy makers involved in economic policy, including our two major Presidential candidates, subscribe to a particular economic doctrine, even if they may not be...