Every so often, when the temptation is too great, I’ll comment on something written by Paul Krugman. When he botched his analysis of Estonia, for instance, I joined that nation’s President in correcting some egregious errors. And I periodically remind people that…
Daily Analysis
Big Government Redistributes Money from Ordinary Americans to Benefit Washington’s Gilded Class
Regular readers know I complain about the army of overpaid bureaucrats in Washington, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The larger problem is that Washington also is filled with hundreds of thousands of other people who get rich thanks to big government. And…
Will Paul Ryan and GOP Budget Negotiators Snatch Defeat from the Jaws of Victory?!?
There’s a joke in Washington that Democrats are the evil party and Republicans are the stupid party. Except this joke isn’t very funny since a lot of bad policy occurs when gullible GOPers get lured into “bipartisan” deals that expand government. Consider, for…
The Rise (and Upcoming Fall) of the Welfare State in the Western World
I routinely (some would say repetitively) argue that the burden of government spending is a drag on the economy because labor and capital are being misallocated via the political process. My message is that we need to reduce the size of the public sector, even if we…
CF&P Joins Coalition Warning Against Reversing Sequester Cuts
Last week the Center for Freedom & Prosperity joined with the National Taxpayers Union and 17 other groups to warn Republican leaders against making the mistake of undoing the sequester cuts. The letter notes: The BCA established limits on discretionary spending…
The European Crisis (and American Future?) of Too Many Over-Compensated Bureaucrats
The only sustainable way of achieving more prosperity and higher living standards is to increase the quality and quantity of labor and capital in the economy. This may sound like boring econo-speak, but labor and capital are the two “factors of production” and our…
Iceland, Switzerland, and the Golden Rule of Fiscal Policy
Being a glass-half-full kind of guy, I look for kernels of good news when examining economic policy around the world. I once even managed to find something to praise about French tax policy. And I can assure you that’s not a very easy task. I particularly try to find…
Keynesian Economics, Government Shutdowns, and Economic Growth
Keynesian economics is the perpetual motion machine of the left. You build a model that assumes government spending is good for the economy and you assume that there are zero costs when the government diverts money from the private sector. With that type of model, you…
If There’s a Grand Bargain, Taxpayers Should Get a Tax Cut rather than a Tax Hike
The Washington metropolitan area has become America’s wealthiest region because trillions of dollars are taken every year from the productive sector of the economy and then divvied up by the politicians, bureaucrats, lobbyists and interest groups that benefit from…
For any Fiscal Policy Question, Spending Restraint Is the Answer
Okay, I’ll admit the title of this post is an exaggeration. How to fix the mess at the IRS is a fiscal policy question, and that requires tax reform rather than spending restraint. But allow me a bit of literary license. We just had a big debt limit battle in…