As Minnesota grapples with an increasingly urgent workforce skills gap, stories like Minnesota banker Dennis Frandsen’s offer inspiration. Frandsen—whose business holdings include banks and manufacturing companies that employ 1,000 people…
Unfortunately, Minnesota has already picked winners and losers in the energy sector. The winners are monopoly utility companies who make a profit on every dollar they spend on infrastructure, and those…
The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency just got smacked down–again. The rogue agency’s audacious attempt to micro-manage 1,300 northern lakes and streams was turned back on appeal. The Duluth News Tribune…
Do young Minnesotans need a four-year college degree to find success in life? Many high school students say that’s the message they’re getting. But a first-ever Thinking Minnesota Poll makes…
“Incentives do make a difference,” according to Gov. Mark Dayton recently. So why does he want to incentivize Minnesotans to leave the state?
Skilled trades are, for the most part, a predominantly male bastion. But community and technical colleges in Minneapolis and St. Paul are ramping up their efforts to get more women…
I’ve always found Brian Wesbury of First Trust to be insightful and a particularly good communicator of sometimes difficult to understand economic issues. Here’s his new Thoughts on Trade. You…
A trade war will leave losers all across the United States, including here in Minnesota.
Snowy days in April only underscore the futility of relying on solar energy to power the electric grid. These photos taken earlier this winter of snow-covered solar panels just outside…
Economists are often having the same debates today as they were at some time in the past. Here, in Newsweek from this day in 1963, the great economic writer Henry…
There may be an amendment to the state constitution coming down the road on the ballot this November aimed at improving the state’s highway infrastructure. If passed by the legislature,…
A round-up of the last week’s economic news stories in Minnesota.
New figures indicate that two thirds of Millennials had never heard of Auschwitz and nearly a quarter had not heard of the Holocaust. Figures also suggest that Millennials are the…
All Minnesota lawmakers should be grateful to Rob Undersander for exposing a loophole in the system that allowed the millionaire to legally take food stamps for a year and a…
If Dayton succeeds, he shifts the culture even closer to the socialist ideal of shaping little hearts and minds with the state’s approved education, re-orients our family schedules and budgets…
There's good news and bad news. Gas prices this summer are forecast to be higher than they have been for the last four years, according to the U.S. Energy Information…
The 'affordable housing crisis' in Minnesota is a creation of state and local government. The solution is not to have them intervene more, as Governor Dayton proposes to do with…
The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) just released its most recent results, for 2017. How did the country’s fourth and eighth graders do in reading and math? More-or-less the…
Could the Janus case restore civility to Minnesota’s politics and classrooms?
Windmills require copper, and lots of it.
The Star Tribune reported yet another fatality, and suspension of normal service involving light rail trains. Does the "multi-model" approach favored by the Met Council and MnDOT make sense? Do…
Occupational licensing requirements are presented as 'consumer protection' but really only protect producers, making us all worse off. Minnesota has, traditionally, had an accommodating environment but between 2012 and 2017,…
Amid profound partisan rifts, Minnesotans upend conventional wisdom with a strong and universal preference for the value of a tech school education.
The Minnesota Conservative Energy Forum may use conservative-sounding language and have pictures of Ronald Reagan on their website, but their policy recommendations are not at all conservative.