Author Archives : Dan Mitchell
Our Tax Dollars Are Funding Bureaucrats Who Advise Congress that Higher Taxes Increase Prosperity
I’ve already written about the terrible work of the Congressional Budget Office. The CBO did an awful job on the stimulus, for instance, repeatedly asserting that diverting money from the private sector to government somehow would create jobs. CBO also was a disaster on Obamacare, claiming that a giant new entitlement program would reduce budget […]
read more...Congressional Staffers Should Cry on Their Own Dime
I saw a story linked on Instapundit, but it really belonged on The Onion. Apparently, our tax dollars are being used to fund grief counseling for congressional staffers who will lose their jobs in January because of the elections. Can you think of a better example than this of how Washington is screwed up? This […]
read more...With Ethanol Handouts Up for Renewal, Will the GOP Side with Corrupt Lobbyists or Free Markets?
Tim Carney of the Washington Examiner has a great piece looking at the utterly indefensible panoply of ethanol subsidies and handouts that screw consumers and taxpayers in order to line the pockets of the politically powerful. Unfortunately, several senior GOP lawmakers have unseemly ties to the lobbyists for the industry. So this is a test, […]
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Debunking White House Pro-Tax Increase Propaganda
The White House recently released a video, narrated by Austan Goolsbee of the Council of Economic Advisers, asserting that higher tax rates on the so-called rich would be a good idea. Since Goolsbee’s video made so many unsubstantiated assertions and was guilty of so many sins of omission, here’s a rebuttal video, narrated by yours truly. […]
read more...Banning Happy Meal Toys in San Francisco
Reason TV has a new video in their great Nanny-of-the-Month series. The winner is a San Francisco politician who pushed through legislation to ban restaurants like McDonald’s from including toys in happy meals. Here’s a great idea: How about banning politicians from trying to tell us how to live our lives? Our Founding Fathers surely […]
read more...Should the Fed Print More Money?
Chairman Ben Bernanke has announced that the Federal Reserve will buy about $600 billion of government bonds as part of what is being called QE2 (because this is the second big stage of “quantitative easing”). This actually isn’t printing money, but it has the same effect in that it creates more liquidity by putting more […]
read more...Global Taxation: An Idea so Terrible that Even the Obama Administration Is Opposed
The old saying that “two wrongs don’t make a right” is especially true in the field of public policy. A good example is the crazy new proposal from the United Nations to collect billions of dollars by imposing global taxes on financial transactions and energy. That’s bad enough, but the international bureaucracy wants to impose […]
read more...Can You Name the Hate-Filled, Racist, Right-Wing, Tea-Party Fanatic Who Said This?
At a recent speech in Atlanta, a somewhat famous former elected official made some rather blunt comments about welfare. According to a news report: In discussing welfare, he said rules instituted by liberals to limit benefits to single mothers discouraged blacks from forming families. “Slavery didn’t break up the black families as much as liberal […]
read more...Crazy Environmentalists Launch Anti-Bathing Campaign
Last year, I commented on a handful of crazed environmentalists who were sterilizing themselves because children boost carbon emissions. I thought this was a wonderful form of natural selection since it meant at least some statists weren’t passing on their…um…peculiar genes. We have a related story, which also comes from the United Kingdom. Some nutjobs […]
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