Examples of government waste are not hard to find in Washington DC, but identifying the worst, most egregious instances of destructive spending is more difficult. Based on the facts cited by a new CF&P Libertas published earlier this week, a strong case can be made that subsidies to the OECD are, dollar-for-dollar, the worst use […]
read more...I’ve written before about the importance of getting rid of the Department of Transportation, and I’ve also written about Republicans getting in bed with big government. So you can imagine how agitated I was to read this article about transportation spending at National Review. Written by Andrew McCarthy, it shows that the GOP still has […]
read more...Is it April Fool’s Day? Has somebody in Paris hacked the website at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development? Have we been transported to a parallel dimension where up is down and black is white? Please forgive all these questions. I’m trying to figure out why any organization – even a leftist bureaucracy such […]
read more...According to Gallup, D.C. has the highest amount of economic confidence in the country…and it’s not even close. It would be easy to say that Gallup over-sampled White House staffers wearing Keynesian blinders, but the truth is far more depressing. It would be nice if we could chalk up these results to a simple bubble […]
read more...People often ask why I put so much political humor on this site. The easy answer is that I like a good joke. But I also find that some cartoons and jokes do a very good job of helping people understand economics. I’ve always liked this cartoon, for instance, because it cleverly illustrates the impact […]
read more...What’s the worst policy idea that would cause the most damage to society? I’m tempted to say the value-added tax since our hopes of restraining the federal government will be greatly undermined if we give the buffoons in Washington a new source of revenue. Indeed, this is one of the reasons why Mitt Romney may […]
read more...Back in 2010, I crunched the numbers from the Congressional Budget Office and reported that the budget could be balanced in just 10 years if politicians exercised a modicum of fiscal discipline and limited annual spending increases to about 2 percent yearly. When CBO issued new numbers early last year, I repeated the exercise and […]
read more...During his State of the Union speech, President Obama expressed his desire for an “economy built to last,” an oxymoron emblematic of the President’s embrace of Keynesianism and other failed economic philosophies. Simply put, strong economies are not built; they emerge. To be built implies that there be a builder. Naturally, Obama envisions himself in […]
read more...Leftists want higher tax rates and they want greater tax compliance. But they have a hard time understanding that those goals are inconsistent. Simply stated, people respond to incentives. When tax rates are punitive, folks earn and report less taxable income, and vice-versa. When tax rates increase, sometimes they engage in tax avoidance, lowering their […]
read more...Even when the results coincide with my views, I have a jaundiced view of polling data. In large part, this is because the answers often depend on how a question is framed. That being said, I periodically link to polling data about economic policy if I think we can glean some insight from the data. […]
read more...