These are dark times for advocates of sane fiscal policy. The President and other Democrats have interpreted the recent election as a mandate to raise taxes, and if the past is any indication, the instinct from Republicans will be to cave. As if that isn’t bad…
Daily Analysis
New International Monetary Fund Study Inadvertently Provides Very Strong Evidence against the Value-Added Tax
I’m not a big fan of the International Monetary Fund, largely because the folks in charge oftentimes advocate toxic policies such as bailouts, higher taxes, and currency devaluation. But there are some top-rate economists working at the IMF, and the bureaucracy has…
Rewarding Hospitals to Let Old People Die? That’s the Wrong Way to Cut Government Spending
I used to think I was in favor of every possible step to reduce the burden of government spending. Are agricultural subsidies wasteful and corrupt? Yes, so get rid of the Department of Agriculture. Is Medicaid spending out of control? Yes, so cap outlay growth and…
Is America in Worse Fiscal Shape than Europe?
I’ve shared BIS and OECD data showing that the United States has a bigger long-run fiscal burden than Europe. That’s a bit of a strained comparison since “Europe” includes fiscally responsible countries such as Switzerland and Estonia, but also soon-to-be failed…
Even Leftists Won’t Defend Obama’s Make-Believe $4 Trillion “Grand Bargain” Budget Plan
You have to give President Obama credit for chutzpah. He pushed through a faux stimulus in his first year and Obamacare in his second year, both of which significantly increased the burden of government spending. In the past two years, he’s basically punted, proposing…
Supporters Urge Romney to Announce that He Intends to Reverse the Statist Policies of Obama…and Bush
People in the political world say that President Obama threw Secretary of State Clinton under the bus in an attempt to protect himself from political fallout from Libya. I don’t follow those issues, so I can’t comment about the veracity of that charge, but I find it…
The Federalism Solution to the Medicaid Nightmare
This election season has seen lots of talk (and demagoguery) about whether investors, entrepreneurs, and small business owners should be hit with class-warfare tax policy. And there’s also been lots of debate about the best way of averting bankruptcy for Medicare,…
European Politicians Share Obama’s View of a “Balanced Approach”
President Obama supports higher taxes, but he usually claims he only wants higher tax rates on evil rich people as part of his class-warfare agenda. Heck, he promised back in 2008 that, “no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not…
Amusing California Satire by Walter Williams, but What if Gov. Brown Takes It Seriously?
I periodically mock the crazy statists of California. The state is almost surely doomed to suffer a Greek-style fiscal chaos. The only unknown is whether Illinois will beat the Golden State into default. The politicians in Sacramento impose very high taxes to fund a…
America’s Best and Worst Governors
One of my favorite Cato Institute publications is the Fiscal Policy Report Card on America’s Governors, which is produced by my colleague Chris Edwards. The report card uses variables such as the burden of government spending and the degree of class warfare tax policy…