Regulatory accumulation – the relentless layering of new rules atop old ones over decades – can smother economic innovation and investment. Continuously improving the regulatory environment for entrepreneurship and growth is integral to progressive efforts to make government work better.
Americans justifiably have long taken great pride in the unmatched ability of the U.S. economy to enable entrepreneurs to launch and grow highly innovative companies that drive growth and advance living standards. Bold entrepreneurs and the companies they founded brought us modern communications, airplanes, automobiles, computer software and hardware, and electricity and other forms of […]
For many Americans, self-employment and running a small business can be an important pathway to the middle class, yet accessing credit to start or grow a business is more difficult, and potentially even more dangerous, than most realize. While banks have historically provided the majority of small business credit in the United States, and still […]
Throughout the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump promised a massive infrastructure program financed primarily by the private sector. Trump’s 2018 budget proposed leveraging $200 billion in direct federal spending into $1 trillion in infrastructure investment through private sector incentives. However, President Trump recently retreated from this campaign pledge that private sector funding would be a […]
They’re a tempting alternative to raising taxes, but their long-term costs far outweigh the revenue they bring in. Raising taxes is painful. That may be why, since 2010, 47 states and a number of cities have instead raised both civil and criminal fines and fees. These increases are often viewed as a conflict-free way to […]
As President Trump and Republicans go full throttle to ram a partisan tax bill through Congress this week, let’s step back and ask a basic question: What does the U.S. economy need most today? The answer isn’t tax cuts – it’s public investment in modern infrastructure. Having wasted most of 2017 trying to kill ObamaCare, […]
House Republicans have passed a grotesque tax giveaway to the richest 1 percent that will only exacerbate America’s biggest economic and political problem: the massive income inequality that inhibits broad-based growth and is leaving more and more Americans out of the middle class. What’s more, the Republican tax bills squander essentially all the money needed for investments […]
The FTC recently asked for comments on “Competition and Consumer Protection in the 21st Century.” PPI submitted two excerpts from a forthcoming paper, “Taking Competition Policy Seriously: Macro Indicators for Regulators.” Here is a summary of the first excerpt, the introduction: Recent work has linked increased concentration to poor macroeconomic outcomes. In this spirit, this […]
PPI has repeatedly made the economic case that accelerating the deployment of 5G is essential for boosting growth. For example, in a 2016 report, we estimated that next generation wireless could add 0.7 percentage points annually to economic growth.* Moreover, as we noted in a January 2018 report, 5G networks can play a key role […]
We think of the United States as a low-inflation economy, with an overall price increase of 36% since 2000, or less than 2% a year. But the fact is, the inflation performance of different industries has varied greatly since 2000. For example, the price of construction has gone up more than 100% since 2000, as […]
