Fewer people working means permanently lower tax revenues.

If you think about it, candidate Obama, Sen. Obama, was running on sort of long-run economic issues, like restoring prosperity to the middle class, dealing with the perennial problem of health care in the United States. He talked a lot about the budget deficit, about the need to transition to clean energy.

You care about the deficit because it allows you to do things you need to do to help people who are suffering.

I think something that forces financial institutions to write down underwater mortgages, I think, would be a sensible thing to do.

Making labor less expensive helps firms hire people.

Raising the minimum wage, as President Obama proposed in his State of the Union address, tends to be more popular with the general public than with economists.

Many of my students assume that government protection is the only thing ensuring decent wages for most American workers. But basic economics shows that competition between employers for workers can be very effective at preventing businesses from misbehaving.