The following is a summary highlighting testimony by AEI Director of Economic Policy Studies Kevin Hassett to the Joint Economic Committee at a hearing entitled "How the Taxation of Capital Affects Growth and Employment."

OPM's response to our federal-private pay comparison levels several feeble criticisms on wages, soft-pedals the benefits issue, and ignores all of the problems with its own methodology.

The international diplomacy of climate change is the most implausible and unpromising initiative since the disarmament talks of the 1930s, and for many of the same reasons; that the Kyoto Protocol and its progeny are the climate diplomacy equivalent of the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 that promised to end war (a treaty that is still on the books, by the way), and finally, that future historians are going to look back on this whole period as the climate policy equivalent of wage and price controls to fight inflation in the 1970s.

Alan Krueger, recently named by President Obama to be the new chair of the Council of Economic Advisors, is perhaps best known for his claim that raising minimum wage will not reduce employment. But Krueger has had a long, varied career as a labor economist--and a history that should be especially interesting to budget cutters.

If it was indeed al Shabaab that trained the Boko Haram militants, then Somalia has become a training center as well as a safe haven for radical Islamist groups. This new role means that al Shabaab is something more than simply an insurgent group; it is also an enabler in al Qaeda’s "far" war against the West and its allies.

After adjusting for education and experience, federal workers have higher salaries than private workers in the same fields, and when factoring in their generous benefits packages, total compensation for federal workers could be nearly $14,000 per year more than for similar private workers.

Several studies have shown that public-sector workers receive higher compensation than their counterparts in the private sector. Although, federal contractors have some of the advantages of private sector workers, in that poor performers can be dismissed and the composition of the contractor workforce altered, it is possible that they are overcompensated just as federal employees are right now.