Many public workers are overpaid relative to their private sector counterparts, especially in large, unionized states such as Wisconsin, Ohio and California. This may sound like a controversial claim, but it shouldn't. A consensus is building about the need for reform.

Hires, quits, and layoffs exhibit strong, highly nonlinear relationships to employer growth rates in the cross section. Simple statistical models of these relationships greatly improve our ability to account for fluctuations in aggregate worker flows and enable us to construct synthetic measures of hires, separations, quits, and layoffs back to 1990.

The recent improvement in payrolls and the unemployment rate are welcome news, but the plight of the long-term unemployed in the United States is considerable. The policies that have been executed since mid-2008 to foster an economic recovery have failed to deliver measurable results, and those most hurt by the current downturn are often the long-term unemployed.

The idea that government can create jobs in the economy is a myth, and painting the myth green makes it no less of a myth. The experience of Europe, which has preceded us in the quest for a new green economy, is both negative, and unsustainable, with subsidies being cut back, and feed-in tariffs reduced.

Sound retirement security policy for future retirees requires planning. Workers need to be engaged; employers need to be responsible; and policymakers must ensure that pension law, tax law, and the Social Security system operate in a manner that promotes opportunities for private saving, appropriate retirement asset management, and sustainability and predictability.