I got involved in a bit of a controversy last year about presidential profligacy. Some guy named Rex Nutting put together some data on government spending and claimed that Barack Obama was the most frugal President in recent history. I pointed out that Mr. Nutting’s data left something to be desired because he didn’t adjust […]
read more...Want to know why – as shown by this map – most of America’s richest counties are part of the metropolitan DC region? Part of the answer is that federal bureaucrats are overpaid. Another part of the answer is that the Washington area is filled with consultants and contractors, and this shadow government workforce also […]
read more...I spoke earlier today at the 2013 Liberty Conference in Lausanne, Switzerland. But I don’t think anybody is going to remember my speech about the collapse of the welfare state, even though I presented lots of powerful data from the BIS, OECD, and IMF, and also shared a very funny cartoon showing what happens when […]
read more...I’m a big fan of that form of satire. And if I’m looking at cartoons specifically about statist economic policy, my favorites include Chuck Asay’s dead pig cartoon, as well as his cartoon about the big bad wolf. And this Michael Ramirez headwinds cartoon is one of the most-viewed posts in the history of my […]
read more...As illustrated by this chart, economists are lousy forecasters. To be more specific, economists are no better than fortune tellers when trying to make short-run macroeconomic forecasts. Heck, if we actually knew what was going to happen over the next 12 months, we’d all be billionaires. But we can (on occasion) make sensible predictions about […]
read more...About two years ago, I shared a map put together by a pro-statism organization that supposedly showed that welfare benefits were very miserly and not sufficiently generous to lift people out of poverty. My gut instinct was to reject the findings. As I wrote at the time: The poverty line is set considerably above a […]
read more...Why does the Tea Party attract such vitriolic opposition, whether from Obama’s IRS or big-government Republicans like Karl Rove? The answer is simple. People in Washington don’t like the Tea Party because this citizen uprising is making it difficult to engage in business-as-usual shenanigans. I shared a couple of columns (here and here) back before […]
read more...I’ve already shared the statist version of the fairy tale about The Little Red Hen. And I’ve also shared the Obama version of the fable about The Ant and the Grasshopper. So how about the left-wing version of The Little Engine that Could. Or, in this case, couldn’t. I don’t know if this is a […]
read more...Two days ago, I shared an insightful article from Kevin Williamson as we contemplated the President’s ideology. Yesterday, we reviewed an article by Richard Epstein in hopes of deciphering Obama’s approach to economic policy. Let’s conclude our series by looking at whether there’s something special about the scandals swirling around the White House. Big government […]
read more...The bad news is that governments do a lot of things they shouldn’t do. The good news is that I never run out of material. I’ve even created some sub-categories, such as my U.S. vs U.K. government stupidity contest and my great-moments-in-local-government series. But I never thought I would have a special category about bureaucrats […]
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