The Office of Management and Budget released the February forecast today showing an improved outlook for the economy and the state budget for the current two-year budget cycle. The state…
Entrepreneurship is the engine of growth in the economy. New businesses are not only responsible for creating the majority of new jobs, but they also have an outsized impact on…
Last week, I noted that Minnesota and its neighbors have very different economic policies but very similar employment outcomes. This holds over time. As Figure 1 shows, Minnesota and its…
Center of the American Experiment has produced regular reports on Minnesota’s economy since 2016 and these have often included a chart showing the employment ratio (the share of the civilian…
North Dakota joined 20 other states in sending the Biden administration the legal equivalent of a Christmas lump of coal. A lawsuit filed days before Christmas aims to block the…
Last week, the Fraser Institute published its annual Economic Freedom of North America report. The new edition, which looks at data from 2021, ranked Minnesota among the least free states…
These were some of the headlines in local media in July, when CNBC released its annual “America’s Top States for Business” ranking: On closer investigation it turned out that these…
Between 2021 and 2022, Ten states enacted individual income tax rate reductions. Six states enacted corporate income tax rate reductions. Oklahoma became the first state to make permanent the full expensing of…
School choice is making waves across the country thanks to union boss Randi Weingarten.
Last week, I noted that median household income in Minnesota has grown more slowly than nationally in six of the last seven years. Nevertheless, it remains above national average. One…
A recent MinnPost “fact brief” article used national assessment data to show that, on average, Minnesota’s scores for fourth- and eighth-grade math and reading have been slightly higher than Iowa’s…
Iowa, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wisconsin are all more appealing states to teach in compared to Minnesota, according to an analysis by the left-leaning Learning Policy Institute. (And how…
The Iowa company backing what’s billed as the world’s biggest carbon capture pipeline just hit a roadblock, if not a dead end, in the state where the controversial project would…
When I have pointed out the record numbers of Minnesotans fleeing the state in recent years, one of the standard responses has been: …something like “breaking news: old people are leaving…
Gov. Walz is notoriously thin-skinned. At an appearance in Iowa last week, he said: “There is kind of an unwritten rule when we are dealing with things not to criticize…
50 years after its TIME cover story, does Minnesota still work?
The Saturday melee at the Minneapolis Ward 10 Democratic convention has received worldwide attention. I’m not going to get into the middle of who did what and who was to…
A lesson for state and local policymakers.
Despite a $19 billion budget surplus, House Democrats are pushing a transportation bill that raises sales taxes in the metro area and adds a new fee for home deliveries from…
The Upper Sioux Agency State Park draws more than 30,000 visitors annually to Yellow Medicine County in southwestern Minnesota. But probably not for much longer, given the Walz administration’s plan…
How school closures became a policy decision that held Minnesota students hostage.
The dust has settled on campaign finance for the 2022 election and Democrats once again out-raised and outspent Republicans by a long shot. It wasn’t even close. The Alliance for…
Happy National School Choice Week (NSCW)! It’s that time of year again to celebrate effective K-12 education options available to children and families across the country — from traditional public…
Teachers’ unions and other school choice opponents use every excuse they can to limit empowering families with greater education choice, including that such programs don’t benefit rural areas because options…