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This piece first appeared at Real Clear Policy.

POLICIES FOR THE NEXT ADMINISTRATION. PART 10: ECONOMIC INEQUALITY

This is the tenth in a series on the major policy ideas — from Left and Right — that should guide the next presidential administration's agenda. (For the opposing view, see David Madland, "A Path Forward for the Middle Class and the Country.")

Do we want to live in a society in which people profit when they have new ideas, products, and abilities that others are willing to pay for? If so, then we will also have economic inequality.   read more »

Can the party of oligarchy also be the party of the people? Besides fending off the never-ending taint of corruption, which could weaken the extent of her “mandate,” this may prove the central challenge of a Hillary Clinton regime.  read more »

A friend recently expressed an interest in how some cities are reforming their land use regulations. “I mean, there are places like LA that say they’ve thrown out the code books and are rewriting their zoning.” My short response was… No. The reality is that the city plays an expensive and byzantine game of cat and mouse with each individual neighborhood.  read more »

It’s almost a truism in urbanist circles that construction of urban freeways was a bad idea.

Indianapolis Monthly magazine takes a somewhat more charitable view in its retrospective on the 40th anniversary of the completion of the downtown “inner loop” freeway.  read more »

The Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) has issued a “red warning” for the entire housing market in Canada.” According to CMHC the red warnings are due to “strong evidence of problematic conditions for Canada overall. Home prices have risen ahead of economic fundamentals such as personal disposable income and population growth. This has resulted in overvaluation in many Canadian housing markets.”  read more »

When Americans consider a move to another part of the country, they sometimes are forced to make a tough choice: should they go to a city with the best job opportunities, or a less economically vital area that offers a better standard of living, particularly more affordable housing? However,  there are still plenty of metropolitan areas in the U.S. where you can get the best of both worlds.  read more »

Retraining the employed and the unemployed for higher value-added skills is now more important than simply adding to the number of jobs.

Coal and steel magnate Wilbur Ross, a senior policy advisor to the Trump campaign, has just made in the pages of the Wall Street Journal an economic prediction that looks mathematically unattainable.  read more »

From Southern California to Shanghai and London, inflated real estate prices have evolved into a simulacrum for broader prosperity. In an era of limited income gains, growing inequality, political dysfunction and fading productivity, the conjunction of low interest rates and essentially free money for the rich and well-placed has sparked the construction of often expensive, high-density residential housing.  read more »

One of the great pleasures of China is a walk along the Bund promenade.

Shanghai’s Bund is one of China’s great tourist and historic sites. Its history lessons are from two distinctively different periods. All of this can be witnessed from the raised promenade along the west bank of the Huang Pu River, which separates the old Puxi (west of the river) commercial core of Shanghai from the new, iconic business district that has grown up in Pudong (east of the river). It is clear that the promenade at the Bund is a very popular local tourist attraction as well.  read more »

It’s increasingly unfashionable to celebrate those who made this republic and established its core values. On college campuses, the media and, increasingly, in corporate circles, the embrace of “diversity” extends to demeaning the founding designers who arose from a white population that was 80 percent British.  read more »