I’ve complained endlessly that America’s fiscal problem is too much spending, and that deficits and debt are best understood as symptoms of that underlying disease. So I’m obviously a big fan of this new video from the folks at Learn Liberty. I like how they use several types of measurements to show that there’s plenty […]
read more...I’ve argued, ad nauseam, that the single most important goal of fiscal policy is (or should be) to make sure the private sector grows faster than the government. This “golden rule” is the best way of enabling growth and avoiding fiscal crises, and I’ve cited nations that have made progress by restraining government spending. But […]
read more...Even though I favor radical reductions in the burden of government, I’ve made the point that good fiscal policy merely requires that government spending grow slower than the private sector – what I call Mitchell’s Golden Rule. And if lawmakers simply cap the growth of spending, so that it grows by about 2 percent annually, […]
read more...With the exception of a few top-notch thinkers such as Pierre Bessard and Allister Heath, there are very few people in Europe who can intelligently analyze public policy, particularly with regard to fiscal issues. I don’t know if Fredrik Erixon of the Brussels-based European Centre for International Political Economy is even close to being in […]
read more...Many people think that my opposition to tax increases is ideological, but they’re wrong. If someone told me that I magically had the power to flick a switch and give the country a flat tax, but that simple and fair tax system would only be possible if the rate was set high enough to give […]
read more...Actually, Bill Clinton must be something even worse than a social Darwinist. That’s because the title of this post is wrong. Obama said that Paul Ryan’s plan (which allows spending to grow by an average of 3.1 percent per year over the next decade) is a form of “social Darwinism.” But the proposal from the […]
read more...Why is big government bad for an economy? The easy answer is that big government usually means high tax rates, and this penalizes work, saving, investment, and entrepreneurship. And perhaps some of the spending is financed by borrowing, and this diverts money from private investment. That’s a correct answer, but it’s only part of the […]
read more...I wrote last year about a backlash from long-suffering Greek taxpayers. These people – the ones pulling the wagon rather than riding in the wagon – are being raped and pillaged by a political class that is trying to protect the greedy interest groups that benefit from Greece’s bloated public sector. We now have another […]
read more...Last year, I shared a very amusing Michael Ramirez cartoon showing Obama as the European lemming. Now, Mark Helprin takes a much more serious look at the same issue in the Wall Street Journal, commenting on the wisdom (or lack thereof) of Obama’s interest in the European economic model. Both in his re-election campaign and […]
read more...A couple of weeks ago, I offered some guarded praise for Paul Ryan’s budget, pointing out that it satisfies the most important requirement of fiscal policy by restraining spending – to an average of 3.1 percent per year over the next 10 years – so that government grows slower than the productive sector of the […]
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