Germany isn’t exactly a fiscal role model. Tax rates are too onerous and government spending consumes about 44 percent of economic output. That’s even higher than it is in the United States, where politicians at the federal, state, and local levels divert about…
Daily Analysis
Obama’s New Budget: Burden of Government Spending Rises More than Twice as Fast as Inflation
The President’s new budget has been unveiled. There are lots of provisions that deserve detailed attention, but I always look first at the overall trends. Most specifically, I want to see what’s happening with the burden of government spending. And you probably won’t…
The War on Poverty Has Made a Difference…but the Wrong Kind
On several occasions, I’ve observed that the poverty rate in America was steadily falling, but that progress came to a halt in the mid-1960s when the government declared a War on Poverty. And I almost always included a chart showing the annual poverty rate over…
The Missing Data in Krugman’s German Austerity Narrative
There’s an ongoing debate about Keynesian economics, stimulus spending, and various versions of fiscal austerity, and regular readers know I do everything possible to explain that you can promote added prosperity by reducing the burden of government spending. Simply…
White House Stimulus Report Based on “Keynesian Fairy Dust”
Did you sing Happy Birthday? The nation just “celebrated” the fifth anniversary of the signing of the so-called American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, more commonly referred to as the “stimulus.” This experiment in Keynesian economics was controversial when it was…
Big Government and Tipping Points: Is America Is Doomed to Become a Failed European-Style Welfare State?
When I give speeches around the country, I often get asked whether it’s time to give up. More specifically, has America reached a tipping point, with too many people riding in the wagon of government dependency and too few people creating wealth and pulling the wagon…
The Wages of Cronyism, Big Government, and Corruption
The Bible says that “the wages of sin is death,” but the same can’t be said of Washington, DC. The bureaucrats, lobbyists, politicians, contractors, insiders, cronyists, and influence peddlers have rigged the system so that they get rich by diverting money from people…
A Single Picture to Show that Many Nations Are Economically Doomed
Over the years, I’ve shared many charts, graphs, and tables to help people understand that the welfare state is fundamentally unsustainable. And, assuming there’s not genuine entitlement reform, many of these fiscal estimates show that the United States has a very…
New CBO Numbers Show a Remarkably Simple Path to a Balanced Budget
A just-released report from the bean counters at the Congressional Budget Office is getting lots of attention because the bureaucrats are now admitting that Obamacare will impose much more damage to the economy than they previously predicted. Of course, many people…
Yet another Example of the Failure of Keynesian Economics
Early last year, with the sequester about to begin, President Obama stated that “these cuts are not smart, they are not fair, they will hurt our economy, they will add hundreds of thousands of Americans to the unemployment rolls.” He made this statement…