I’ve written, ad nauseum, about the economic impact of excessive government spending. But I’ve also acknowledged that Article I, Section VIII of the Constitution grants specific powers to the federal government. What I’ve neglected to explore, though, is the key issue of how today’s bloated welfare state interferes with and undermines the government’s ability to […]
read more...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 published some good studies about the economic benefits of reducing government spending and […]
read more...Here’s a remarkable chart showing that we spend about $60,000 on various welfare programs for every poor household in America. And what are we getting for that giant expenditure of money? Well, as this other chart shows, our progress in the fight against poverty came to a screeching halt right about the time that the […]
read more...I’ve written before about the heavy costs of regulation, including these rather sobering statistics. Or, to be more accurate, here are some staggering numbers. Americans spend 8.8 billion hours every year filling out government forms. The economy-wide cost of regulation is now $1.75 trillion. For every bureaucrat at a regulatory agency, 100 jobs are destroyed […]
read more...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 block grant the program to the states. Has NATO […]
read more...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 states such as Greece and France. But the one common theme, as I explain in […]
read more...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 budgets that are so laughably unserious that they received zero votes […]
read more...Since I’ve been in Washington from more than 25 years, it takes something really remarkable to shock me. But when I read today that federal bureaucrats are supposedly underpaid, notwithstanding all the evidence to the contrary, I thought somebody had sent me an article from the Onion. But then I saw that the assertion of […]
read more...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 very interesting that some conservatives are urging Mitt […]
read more...Part of my job is to educate people about free markets and fiscal policy. In some cases, that means providing information and analysis to those already sympathetic to limited government. There are many people who like the idea of lower tax burdens, for instance, but they may not have given much thought to the interaction […]
read more...