Those of you old enough to remember the Cold War may remember something called the Brezhnev Doctrine. This was the rule concocted by the Soviet tyrants that basically said a nation could never regain freedom once it fell under communist rule. In my simple way of looking at such matters, this rule translated into: “What’s […]
read more...First, some good news. The United States is in much better shape than most other developed nations, particularly if you look at broad measures of prosperity and living standards. And our economy is growing and the private sector is creating jobs. That’s the glass-half-full way of looking at things. But if you’re a glass-half-empty person, […]
read more...What’s the worst thing about Delaware? No, not Joe Biden. He’s just a harmless clown and the butt of some good jokes. Instead, the so-called First State is actually the Worst State because 100 years ago, on this very day, Delaware made the personal income tax possible by ratifying the 16th Amendment. Though, to be […]
read more...I almost feel sorry for the Obama Administration’s spin doctors. Every month, they probably wait for the unemployment numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics with the same level of excitement that people on death row wait for their execution date. This has been going on for a while and today’s new data is another […]
read more...Daniel Hannan is a member of the European Parliament from England. He is one of the few economically sensible people in that body, as demonstrated in these short clips of him speaking about tax competition and deriding the European Commission’s corrupt racket. And as you can see from his latest article in the UK-based Telegraph, […]
read more...Fighting against statism in Washington is a lot like trying to swim upstream. It seems that everything (how to measure spending cuts, how to estimate tax revenue, etc) is rigged to make your job harder. A timely example is the way the way government puts together data on economic output and the way the media […]
read more...I’m at Hillsdale College in Michigan for a conference on taxation. The event is called “The Federal Income Tax: A Centenary Consideration,” though I would have called it something like “100 Years of Misery from the IRS.” I’m glad to be here, both because Hillsdale proudly refuses to take government money (which would mean being […]
read more...Here are some odious details from the UK-based Sun. Danny Creamer, 21, and Gina Allan, 18, spend each day watching their 47in flatscreen TV and smoking 40 cigarettes between them in their comfy two-bedroom flat. It is all funded by the taxpayer, yet the couple say they deserve sympathy because they are “trapped”. Does this […]
read more...Much to the horror of various interest groups, it appears that there will be a “sequester” on March 1. This means an automatic reduction in spending authority for selected programs (interest payments are exempt, as are most entitlement outlays). Just about everybody in Washington is frantic about the sequester, which supposedly will mean “savage” and […]
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