On Monday, Memorial Day, Wal-Mart will begin fulfilling its promise to hire any recent, honorably discharged veteran that wants a job (at least part-time). The world’s largest retailer says its pledge, part of the Obama administration’s “Joining Forces” initiative, will result in the company hiring more than 100,000 vets over the next five years. “Wal-Mart is already the largest private employer of veterans — and we want to hire more,” says the company’s website. Read more »

Watching the Senate hearing yesterday with Apple chief executive Tim Cook, I came to the conclusion that there are some things the government should not be trying to do even if the reasons for doing so are obviously good ones. And one of those things is taxing corporations. Read more »

MILAN – In a recent set of studies, Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff used a vast array of historical data to show that the accumulation of high levels of public (and private) debt relative to GDP has an extended negative effect on growth. The size of the effect incited debate about errors in their calculations. Few, however, doubt the validity of the pattern. Read more »

Experts agree that broadband internet is a critical piece of 21st-century infrastructure. The Federal Communications Commission has stated that “broadband is a foundation for economic growth, job creation, global competitiveness and a better way of life.” Read more »

In the litany of Washington debates about current and future U.S. economic competitiveness, demographics is consistently placed on the advantage side of the U.S. competitiveness ledger. A broad view of the macro demographic trends—taking into account only population growth and age-profile—would indeed seem to support this claim. Yet this ignores other U.S. trends that could strike a blow at worker productivity, undermining the potential economic advantage of favorable demographics. Read more »

There are many remarkable findings in the polling cited by Andrew Kohut and Michael Dimock in their new working paper for Renewing America, entitled “Resilient American Values: Optimism in an Era of Growing Inequality and Economic Difficulty,” but the most remarkable I thought is a set of side-by-side pie charts. In the first, the Pew Research Center asked Americans if they “admire people who are rich,” and just 27 percent said yes. But then Americans were asked if they “admire people who get rich by working hard,” and fully 88 percent said they agreed. Read more »

In the wake of the collapse of the garment factory in Bangladesh, I have been thinking a lot about the issue of corporate social responsibility. The factory was making clothes for western companies including Primark of the UK and Loblaws of Canada, and in many ways the clothing companies have been among the most focused in recent years at trying to police their supply chains to ensure safer working conditions and decent wages. Yet at least 430 people were killed working to meet deadlines set by western companies in a facility that should have been torn down years ago. Read more »