Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird, it’s a plane…no it’s Super Bureaucrat! Actually, look to New Jersey, because you’re going to see a taxpayer ripoff that will get your blood boiling. Depending on your perspective, this may be worse than the toll collector on the New Jersey Turnpike who pocketed more than $300,000 […]
read more...The welfare state is a nightmare. Programs such as Medicaid are fiscal catastrophes. The food stamp program is riddled with waste. The EITC is easily defrauded, even sending checks to prisoners. And housing subsidies are a recipe for the worst forms of social engineering. The entire system should be tossed in the trash. But what’s […]
read more...After nearly five years in office, what’s President Obama’s most significant accomplishment? This is a serious question, so no jokes about the Nobel Prize he received for not being Bush. And no partisan GOP answers about the 2010 election, either. Put yourself in the position of a future historian and think about what you would […]
read more...Writing for Hong Kong’s Harbour Times, CF&P President Andrew Quinlan and I recently coauthored a piece explaining why appeasing the radical demands of the OECD is a losing strategy. Simply put, the global tax collectors will not be satisfied with anything less than the end of all tax competition: Like the OECD’s prior standards, demands […]
read more...Like all advocates of freedom, I normally despair about the future. Whether we’re measuring the ever-growing burden of government or the erosion of key forms of social capital such as self-reliance and the work ethic, it seems that the world is heading in the wrong direction. But, at least for today, I want to be […]
read more...A new Reason-Rupe poll finds Americans increasingly tired of government banning everything they like. The federal government recently proposed rules that would effectively ban trans fats, but 71 percent of Americans say they should be allowed to buy foods with trans fats if they so choose. Just under a quarter, 24 percent of Americans, say […]
read more...I sometimes get irked when I read columns by David Brooks. He’s sort of the token Republican at the New York Times, so he has a very important perch that could be used to educate an important audience about the harmful impact of excessive government. And Brooks often does a good job of highlighting important […]
read more...When you work in Washington (and assuming you haven’t been corrupted), you run the risk of being endlessly outraged about all the waste. But not all waste is created equal. Some examples are so absurd that they deserve special attention. Forcing taxpayers to pay millions of dollars for pro-Obamacare and pro-IRS propaganda. Doing interviews – at a per-person […]
read more...Back in February, I said Australia probably was the country most likely to survive and prosper as much of the world suffered fiscal collapse and social chaos. In hindsight, I probably should have mentioned Canada as an option, in part because of pro-growth reforms in the past two decades that have significantly reduced the burden […]
read more...How Disappointing, but how predictable. Politicians approved legislation in 2011 that was supposed to impose a modest bit of spending restraint over the next 10 years. It wasn’t much. The enforcement mechanism, known as sequestration, merely was supposed to guarantee that spending climbed by $2.3 trillion rather than $2.4 trillion over the 10-year period. But […]
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