It’s obviously quite disappointing that Congressman Paul Ryan has teamed up with Senator Ron Wyden, a Democratic from Oregon, to put forth a significantly watered down version of his Medicare reform plan. Ben Domenech of the Heartland Institute and Peter Suderman of…
Daily Analysis
Economics Reporter from New York Times Has Accidental Encounter with Reality, Learns Nothing
Earlier this year, I wrote about how the person Obama put in charge of Medicare made some very interesting observations about prices, competition, and markets, but then drew exactly the wrong conclusion about what was needed to solve the third-party payer problem in…
Senator Schumer’s Feeble/Dishonest Grasp of Fiscal History
I’m not a big fan of Senator Schumer of New York. As I’ve noted before, he’s a doctrinaire statist who wants the government to have control over just about every aspect of our lives. But that describes a lot of people in Washington. I guess what also bothers me is his…
New Video Punctures Myths about Great Depression, Exposes Damaging Impact of Statist Policies by Hoover and FDR
I’ve commented many times about the misguided big-government policies of both Hoover and FDR, so I can say with considerable admiration that this video packs an amazing amount of solid info into about five minutes. Perhaps the most surprising bit of info in the video…
European Central Bank Research Shows that Government Spending Undermines Economic Performance
Europe is in the midst of a fiscal crisis caused by too much government spending, yet many of the continent’s politicians want the European Central Bank to purchase the dodgy debt of reckless welfare states such as Spain, Italy, Greece, and Portugal in order to prop…
Europe’s Clueless Politicians Are So Incompetent that They Can’t Even Figure Out How to Do the Wrong Thing
There’s always been a simple and desirable solution to Europe’s fiscal crisis, but nobody in Europe wants to do the right thing because it means admitting the failure of big government and it would result in less power for the political elite. So we get the spectacle…
According to the Cluelsss Crowd at the Washington Post, Germany Is “Fiscally Conservative”
By European standards, Germany is in pretty good shape. There’s a very large welfare state and the tax burden is quite onerous, both of which hinder growth, but Germany has been more responsible than the United States in recent years. And while this may be damning…
Big Spenders Gone Wild
Last month, I shared a video about bloated bureaucracy from a group called Government Gone Wild. That generated a big response, so here’s another video from the same group, only this one looks at egregious examples of government waste. If you like videos on wasteful…
What’s the Solution to Europe’s Fiscal Crisis: Spending Cuts, or Bailouts and Easy Money?
In hopes of stopping investor panic about Europe’s fiscal crisis, the world’s major central banks just announced that they will do whatever is needed to ensure financial markets don’t freeze up. This could be an appropriate and relatively benign use of the…
Bureaucrats Gone Wild
This narrator probably won’t get rich, like the guy who did the “Girls Gone Wild” videos, but this is the second-best video I’ve ever seen on the bloated and overpaid government workforce. I especially like how he understands that the problem is the size of…