The Agenda

Spend Smarter on R&D Before Spending More

By Reihan Salam February 4, 2015

Brad Plumer of Vox is worried about the fact that large corporations are investing fewer resources in basic research, and then he frets about declining federal spending on research and development: I’ve written ...

The Minimum Wage Referendums

By Reihan Salam November 3, 2014

On Election Day, voters in four right-leaning states, Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota, will weigh in on whether to raise their state-level minimum wages. The expectation is that these ...

Defending the On-Demand Economy, Part I

By Reihan Salam October 8, 2014

Haven’t we said everything that can be said about Uber and Lyft? I’m as enthusiastic about the newish ridesharing services as your next champion of the market economy. But after ...

How David Cameron Became a Reform Conservative

By Reihan Salam October 2, 2014

American conservatives don’t have much respect for David Cameron, the British prime minister whom many see as a squish. But they should. Most of Cameron’s American admirers focus on his ...

How Both Sides of the Aisle Have Been Hypocritical on Government Accounting

By Jason Richwine October 1, 2014

During the Social Security debates of the late 1990s and early 2000s, some conservatives argued that investing the trust fund (or letting individuals invest their payroll taxes) in stocks would ...

No, Joni Ernst Is Not an Extremist on the Minimum Wage

By Reihan Salam September 30, 2014

To make his case that Joni Ernst, this year’s Republican U.S. Senate nominee, “exists on the radical edge of the Republican Party, with polarizing views on almost everything under the sun,” ...

The Great Suburbia Debate

By Reihan Salam September 28, 2014

Are conservatives turning on the suburbs? Joel Kotkin, the prolific author and executive editor of The New Geography, an excellent resource for students of urbanism, warns that anti-suburban sentiment, which ...

Government Accounting Deceptions Are Everywhere

By Jason Richwine September 26, 2014

The new issue of National Affairs features my article with Jason Delisle, “The Case for Fair-Value Accounting.” We go into a lot of detail about what fair-value accounting (FVA) is, ...

The Case Against a Maximum Wage

By Reihan Salam September 25, 2014

You’re no doubt familiar with the minimum wage debate. Advocates of an increased minimum wage on the left argue that a higher wage floor is essentially a free lunch that ...

How Corporate Tax Reform Can Combat Crony Capitalism

By Reihan Salam September 23, 2014

Congressional Republicans are astonishingly unpopular, and they deserve to be astonishingly unpopular. Remarkably, three-fifths of self-identified Republicans disapprove of the job congressional Republicans are doing, which tells you something. The ...