Reports
Jan 26, 2012
The passage of a right-to-work law would end monopolistic practices in labor markets that have been an important factor in keeping the state from being nearer the top with respect to the standard of living of its citizenry. Moreover, the cost to the state government of doing so would be trivial as enacting a right-to-work law would require no expenditure of taxpayer dollars.
Jan 10, 2012
When it comes to government’s essential role in funding education, the holiest of grails is significantly improving quality while simultaneously constraining costs.
Jul 28, 2011
The following are remarkably insightful first impressions of the military and political situation in Afghanistan by Army Capt. Pete Hegseth, a Minnesota native from Forest Lake—and I’m very pleased to announce, a newly named American Experiment Senior Fellow.
Jul 18, 2011
A reasonable reading of the following 34 brief essays in American Experiment’s newest symposium—What Governmental Services and Benefits Are You Personally Willing to Give Up?—suggests that more Americans than generally assumed may be seriously willing to sacrifice when it comes to major entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare. In the interest of balancing the nation’s skewed books, the columns similarly suggest that more people than routinely thought may be willing to forgo various exemptions and other tax breaks, including near-sacred deductions on home mortgage payments.
Jun 27, 2011
Don’t look now, but the fiscal mountain blocking our path is rockier than usually advertised. Why? Because even if House Budget chairman Paul Ryan prevails on every contentious detail of his long-term plan for prosperity, family fragmentation—more severe in the United States than in any other industrialized nation—will make it more difficult than generally assumed to balance our books.
May 5, 2011
The ability to read is a fundamental life skill, and is vital for success in today’s information economy. We must make basic literacy for all students an urgent priority, if Minnesota is to have the well-informed, self-sufficient citizenry a democracy requires. There is a better way, and we can look to the state of Florida to learn about it.
Apr 11, 2011
This Roundtable points the way to making divorce—when it is, in fact, unavoidable—less damaging to all concerned starting with children. What it also does, even more importantly, is point to early Minnesota-based research and its potential for saving some portion of marriages in ways that most therapists, lawyers, judges and others in the field have never considered, or to be blunt about it, have never cared to consider.
Feb 1, 2011
Energy affordability is vital to Minnesota’s ability to compete both nationally and globally. This report offers a set of recommendations to reintroduce energy affordability as a key priority.
Dec 1, 2010
Tom Kelly argues, current economic debates still somehow persist in being “dominated by ideas that were tried and found wanting” decades ago. Why? “One answer,” he continues, is that “the country seems to have forgotten that a small cadre of economists and politicians accurately diagnosed the cause of the malaise of the 1970s as the prevalent economic thinking of the time,” and that during the ‘80s, they set the nation “on a different course,” leading to a quarter-century of virtually uninterrupted growth.
Nov 1, 2010
The choice before us is of two visions of this country. Will we continue to be a culture of free enterprise—which is to say, a culture based on limited government, on rewards and consequences of behavior that are adjudicated by markets, and by a reliance on and a celebration of entrepreneurship? Or will we become a culture that’s more like European-style social democracy—which is to say, a culture characterized by a large and growing government, a managed economy, and a hard-core focus on income equality?
