If you vote in Indiana’s primary elections, well, I’ve got some bad news for you.

As the new year begins, the one enduring bright spot of the domestic economy is consumer spending. Over the past decade, consumer spending accounted for between 67 and 69% of our total economy or gross domestic product (GDP). Consumers are a large and stable share of total demand for goods a…

Here’s a basic truth about people who make decisions on public policy: they rarely have all the facts they want.

With the clock ticking rapidly toward midnight for the reform of how Indiana undertakes redistricting for legislative and congressional districts, no change is likely to take place.

We just received the most wonderful gift from the U.S.

I released my 2020 economist forecast last week, projecting the U.S. economy to slow significantly next year. The model I use projects that annualized growth rates will slip from 1.9 % in the first quarter of 2020 down to 1.7% by the year’s end. Here in Indiana, my forecasting model has grow…

Not long ago, I was in a meeting to talk about a public policy issue. It was a little complex, and as we considered the various angles I began to think about what it would take to translate talk into change on the ground. I wasn’t analyzing the politics of it — I was focused on the types of …

Let’s review where we have come as an economy since the end of the Great Recession. The news is far more dismal than I prefer, but it is wise to know where we are coming from before discussing our future.

My wife, Ann, is not easily impressed. You might say she was born without a celebrity-awe gene.

The year 1971 was important for economic development in Indiana. For in that year, the actual number of jobs created in firms attracted directly by government policies declined.

To me, it was a thunderclap. Years ago, when I was in Congress, we were in the midst of a tense, contentious debate. Members had gotten irritated, levying charges back and forth, and tempers were rising. It was starting to look like we might just go off the rails. Then one member stood up, a…

Over the dozen or so years I’ve penned this column, I’ve allocated considerable space to education issues. That is natural for an economics and business column. Nothing better predicts the income of a region as does the average educational attainment of its residents. And nothing better pred…

I first discovered the reality of symbols as “emotional shorthand” when I raised a Nazi flag over my family home in Hope in 1954. I was 9 years old and was leading American forces against Germany at the time.

There seems to be a great deal of recent romanticizing the 1950s and 1960s. This is particularly the case with a vague vision of a middle class and middle-class neighborhoods.

"Lee HamiltonRepresentative democracy is based on a simple premise. It’s that ordinary citizens can make satisfactory judgments on complex public policy and political issues — or at least grasp them well enough to decide who should be dealing with them.

Influential and strategically located, Iran has long presented a challenge for U.S. foreign policy. We have struggled for decades to get this important bilateral relationship right, and we aren’t there yet.

I recently attended my first college reunion. It was a charming event, attended by well over half of the living graduates of my class at a small military college in Virginia. The weekend was even more special because my oldest son is undergoing the rigors of freshman year at the same school.…

Amid all the other kerfuffle last week, Congress held hearings on growing evidence of monopsony power in labor markets. For those lucky few who didn’t take a labor economics course, monopsony is simply the ability of a few large local employers to control local labor markets. The worry is th…

One of the not-so-small gifts of living in a representative democracy is that you can’t accomplish things alone. Whether you’re trying to get a stop sign put up on a dangerous corner or to change US policy on greenhouse gas emissions, you have to reach out to others. And learning how to pers…

The economic recovery that began in the summer of 2009 is now over for Indiana.

I am a person who believes the election of President Donald J. Trump is a tragic blow to American moral leadership around the world, and a serious threat to the future of our representative democracy.

“I ask how and why this decision was reached,” Utah Sen. Mitt Romney said in the Senate recently. He was calling for an investigation into President Trump’s decision to pull US forces out of Syria. “Was there no chance for diplomacy? Are we so weak and so inept diplomatically that Turkey for…

The debate on trade and automation was on prime display during the recent Democratic party presidential debate this week. There is a lot packed into this discussion, from trade policy and taxation of capital to the role of place-based economic development efforts and the design of pre-K, hig…

This weekend has me heading to a conference of economic research centers. As always, the big topic is new research, though given the current economic slowdown, there will be many a forecast. In a time when so much research is available on the internet, I’m surprised how useful it is to meet …

I was talking with a friend the other day about immigration. It’s one of the most divisive issues of our time, and we, too, found ourselves divided. “Our country is full,” he quoted President Trump, who said this back in April. Let’s improve the country with the people we already have, my fr…

Many of our national trials and tribulations — along with our Grand-Canyon-size political divide — could be resolved, if someone could just find “the average American.”

The U.S. House of Representatives’ impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump is unlikely to sway voters’ positions, according to Indiana University professor of political science Marjorie Hershey.

“Who is it?” asked one of my college professors in response to a knock on his office door.

NEW YORK — Large majorities of black and Latino Americans think Donald Trump's actions as president have made things worse for people like them, and about two-thirds of Americans overall disapprove of how he's handling race relations, according to a new poll conducted by The Associated Press…

You’re probably chuckling already. Seriously? “The joy of politics”?

Economic growth, not recession, is the norm. For every one quarter the U.S. has spent in recession since the end of World War II, we’ve spent eight quarters growing. Of the 75 quarters in this century, only 10 have been recessionary. I’m counting our current quarter as growth, which may prov…

Indiana Attorney General Curtis Hill has thrown a wrench into what appears to have been an effort by two other state agencies to clear away a little red tape for transgender individuals seeking to obtain a driver's license. He declined to sign off on an administrative rule change that would …

Spending on K-12 education is by far the largest piece of Indiana government. Appropriations for schools make up half of the state’s general fund budget. School budgets are 55% of all local government budgets. Total local school appropriations are $11 billion in 2019. About $7 billion of thi…

Natural disasters, such as hurricanes and tornadoes, have economic costs. They also reveal much about market economies, government planning and response.

A wave of protests is roiling Moscow. Millions of people, young and old, have been crowding the streets in Hong Kong. In Britain, members of the Conservative Party took to open revolt over Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s move to sideline Parliament on Brexit. If democracy is dysfunctional and…