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When Carol Sue Johnson, 73, wheels her silver Mazda S.U.V. out of her driveway in suburban Minneapolis, she doesn't know how much money she will make driving for the ride-hailing service Uber, but she's sure she will have an adventure. Her passengers run the gamut, she said, from three visiting Chinese business executives who were surprised to see a female driver, to teenagers needing a ride to hockey practices or games. When one group of teenagers "started to get too rowdy," said Ms. Johnson, who goes by Sue, "one of them told the others to stop because 'Grandma's in the...

Suppose it is dinnertime, and the phone rings. It is a polite survey taker with a simple question for you: How is the economy doing? You might answer the question based upon the news stories you've seen recently about the latest unemployment rate, or perhaps based on anecdotal observations, such as whether your long-jobless cousin has had any luck finding work. But a wide range of academic work suggests a different factor that is likely to shape your answer: whether the current occupant of the White House is of your preferred political party. Did unemployment get better or worse during...

If it takes more than $126,000 to fund a qualitatively defined middle class lifestyle, what sense does it even make to call this "middle"?The Pew Research Center's recent report The American Middle Class Is Losing Ground: No longer the majority and falling behind financially made a media splash, as it reported that less than 50% of adults are members of the Great American Middle Class. My analysis suggests that by more qualitative measures, no more than a third of U.S. households qualify as middle class: claiming 49% of the nation's households are still middle class is a gross exaggeration. My analysis starts with the minimum...

Some folks think the world owes them a living. Must we appease them? Should government hand every man, woman and child a check each month to make sure we're all taken care of? Finland is looking at this basic idea, which Finns dub an "unconditional basic income" (UBI). One proposal suggests providing every Finn 800-Euros a month without regard to income, or lack thereof. Polling shows the basic idea is quite popular, with 69 percent of Finns endorsing a slightly more generous proposal. It sounds like Democrat George McGovern's "guaranteed annual income," which was mocked and ridiculed during the 1972...

Once upon a time, middle class households took home 62 percent of all income in America. Today, that number has dropped to just 43 percent. This is just one of the absolutely astounding statistics that you will read about in this article. Over the years, the middle class in America has been in steady decline. Our incomes have been going down, our net worth has been going down, the quality of our jobs has been going down, and yet the cost of living just keeps going up. As a result of all of these factors, more Americans are living in...

Authorities in Finland are considering giving every citizen a tax-free payout of €800 (£576) each month. Under proposals being draw up by the Finnish Social Insurance Institution (Kela), this national basic income would replace all other benefit payments, and would be paid to all adults regardless of whether or not they receive any other income. Unemployment in Finland is currently at record levels, and the basic income is intended to encourage more people back to work. At present, many unemployed people would be worse off if they took on low-paid temporary jobs due to loss of welfare payments.

PERSONAL INCOME AND OUTLAYS, OCTOBER 2015 Personal income increased $68.1 billion, or 0.4 percent, and disposable personal income (DPI) increased $56.8 billion, or 0.4 percent, in October, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Personal consumption expenditures (PCE) increased $15.2 billion, or 0.1 percent. In September, personal income increased $27.4 billion, or 0.2 percent, DPI increased $27.0 billion, or 0.2 percent, and PCE increased $9.5 billion, or 0.1 percent, based on revised estimates. Real DPI increased 0.4 percent in October, compared with an increase of 0.3 percent in September. Real PCE increased 0.1 percent in October, the same increase as...

The disturbing evidence about the health of white middle-aged American working class, discovered and publicized this week by Nobel prize winner Angus Deaton and his wife Anne Case, is not tied to just one trend in the culture, policies, or economic factors at work within the United States. It is not the fault of one party or movement, but has multiple root causes. But it is something we all ought to be concerned about, both for the future fiscal and policy burden it represents, and for the broader lesson it tells us about how America is changing. The numbers clearly...

A new report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the personal income of Michigan residents grew 3.7 percent between the second quarter of 2014 and the second quarter of 2015. Even more impressive, from 2012 through the second quarter of 2015 personal income here has increased by 9.2 percent here (from $382 billion to $417 billion). Nationwide, income growth during this same span was 8.3 percent. Michigan became a right-to-work state in December of 2012. The law became effective in March 2013. ForTheRecord says: When Michigan’s right-to-work law was enacted at the end of 2012, unions attacked...

Why EPA Plan Should Concern Fixed-Income Americans the Most Nancy Gravatt, Sr. VP of Communications for the American Mining Association, explains why the President’s new agreement with the Chinese to cut carbon emissions will not fulfill its stated mission, and why the EPA’s new regulations will hit hardest on the pocketbooks of fixed-income Americans.

One of the weird little facts of life that we don’t think about or talk about very much — and really should when we’re talking about taxes, the minimum wage, welfare spending, and other things related to inequality of income and wealth (and go ahead and picture me here manfully resisting the urge to put sneer quotes around “inequality,” as if a uniform distribution of material resources were the natural state of things and not some daft dorm-room fantasy) — is that we pay for everything (really, everything) collectively. Let me show you what I mean. Housing is famously expensive...

Michigan taxpayers and voters were surprised earlier this year as the bill for business subsidies handed out years ago came due higher than expected. It sent legislators scurrying to figure out what to do about the cost of a corporate welfare program begun in 1995. So far, they have come up empty. Nevertheless, there is one loophole that should be explored. It can lower the expense of these incentives while also making Michigan a more inviting place for businesses. Michigan can reduce the generosity of its existing business subsidies by lowering the state’s personal income tax rate. Before 2012, the...

From Bloomberg: U.S. Census Bureau data out Wednesday underscore just how lousy the recovery has been if you aren’t rich. Looking at eight groups of household income selected by Census, only those whose incomes are already high to begin with have seen improvement since 2006, the last full year of expansion before the recession. Households at the 95th and 90th percentiles had larger earnings through 2014, the latest year for which data are available.

Once upon a time, American men used to get something called a "raise." That is when your employer would actually pay you more money. Now, it is true that some people still have experience with this all-but-forgotten practice, but even the ones who do tend not to get pay increases that keep up with price increases. That is why, as David Wessel of the Brookings Institution points out, the typical male worker actually saw his after-inflation pay fall between 1973 and 2014. What is four lost decades between friends? So why, as you can see below, have median male earnings...

SANKUYO, Botswana — Lions have been coming out of the surrounding bush, prowling around homes and a small health clinic, to snatch goats and donkeys from the heart of this village on the edge of one of Africa’s great inland deltas. Elephants, too, are becoming frequent, unwelcome visitors, gobbling up the beans, maize and watermelons that took farmers months to grow. Since Botswana banned trophy hunting two years ago, remote communities like Sankuyo have been at the mercy of growing numbers of wild animals that are hurting livelihoods and driving terrified villagers into their homes at dusk. The hunting ban...

Only Hillary Clinton could try to get away with slamming her Republican opponents for siding with the wealthy at the same time disclosing she’s filthy rich. Just $141 million for her and Bill Clinton since 2007, a figure that makes even the one-percenters envious. But Hillary’s different from other rich people because she wishes she had less money. If only her heartless GOP opponents would let her. “They want to give me another tax cut I don’t need instead of putting middle-class families first,” she said. Another thing that makes Hillary Clinton understand the middle class better: She pulled herself...

The Democrat-Media Complex have just told us what they fear the most as an issue in the 2016 election: President Obama’s plan to “fundamentally transform” suburbia (as explained today by Jeannie DeAngelis). This is an issue that literally hits voters where they live, by using the denial of federal funding to override local control and force communities to provide low-income housing distributed to approved minority groups. Investor’s Business Daily reports that all three broadcast networks ignored the story that affects their viewers more directly than almost any other issue. The Big Three news networks all punted on covering one of...

Of those running for president, who will give this speech? “Ladies and Gentlemen, my administration will implement a series of economic policies to cause the economy to grow at an average rate of 4 percent or more a year. Growth of 4 percent-plus per year will create jobs at a faster rate than the growth in the labor force and provide hope for those who had despaired of finding a good job again. At a growth rate of a little over 4 percent per year, real incomes for all of our citizens will double in only 17 years. (At the...

Scott Santens has been thinking a lot about fish lately. Specifically, he’s been reflecting on the aphorism, “If you give a man a fish, he eats for a day. If you teach a man to fish, he eats for life.” What Santens wants to know is this: “If you build a robot to fish, do all men starve, or do all men eat?” Santens is 37 years old, and he’s a leader in the basic income movement—a worldwide network of thousands of advocates (26,000 on Reddit alone) who believe that governments should provide every citizen with a monthly stipend big...

In a recent panel discussion on poverty at Georgetown University, President Barack Obama gave another demonstration of his mastery of rhetoric — and disregard of reality. One of the ways of fighting poverty, he proposed, was to "ask from society's lottery winners" that they make a "modest investment" in government programs to help the poor. Since free speech is guaranteed to everyone by the First Amendment to the Constitution, there is nothing to prevent anybody from asking anything from anybody else. But the federal government does not just "ask" for money. It takes the money it wants in taxes, usually...