Actually, Bill Clinton must be something even worse than a social Darwinist. That’s because the title of this post is wrong. Obama said that Paul Ryan’s plan (which allows spending to grow by an average of 3.1 percent per year over the next decade) is a form of…
Daily Analysis
A Case Study of How Government Handouts Undermine Human Decency and Social Capital
Why is big government bad for an economy? The easy answer is that big government usually means high tax rates, and this penalizes work, saving, investment, and entrepreneurship. And perhaps some of the spending is financed by borrowing, and this diverts money from…
Revolt of the Irish Tax Slaves
I wrote last year about a backlash from long-suffering Greek taxpayers. These people – the ones pulling the wagon rather than riding in the wagon – are being raped and pillaged by a political class that is trying to protect the greedy interest groups that benefit from…
Assurances on Destructive IRS Regulation Fall Short
Secretary Geithner offered little more than ‘you can trust us’ to assuage concerns.
Should America Copy Europe, as Obama Believes?
Last year, I shared a very amusing Michael Ramirez cartoon showing Obama as the European lemming. Now, Mark Helprin takes a much more serious look at the same issue in the Wall Street Journal, commenting on the wisdom (or lack thereof) of Obama’s interest in the…
New Budget from Republican Study Committee Reduces Burden of Government to Where It Was When Bill Clinton Left Office
A couple of weeks ago, I offered some guarded praise for Paul Ryan’s budget, pointing out that it satisfies the most important requirement of fiscal policy by restraining spending – to an average of 3.1 percent per year over the next 10 years – so that government…
China, Regulation, Wealth, and Chicken Wings
While I’m not oblivious to geopolitical concerns, I don’t worry about China becoming a more prosperous nation. Yes, more wealth could enable the nation’s dictators to finance some unwelcome aggression, but I mostly think higher living standards will create pressure…
If Obamacare Is Constitutional, then Why Did the Founding Fathers Bother with a List of Enumerated Powers?
I think Obamacare is bad policy because it exacerbates the main problem with the current healthcare system, which is third-party payer. And as a public finance economist, I’m obviously not happy about the new taxes and additional spending in Obamacare. But those…
Should States Be Allowed to Tax Outside their Borders, Particularly if It Means a Database of Your Online Purchases?
Tax competition, as I have explained to the point of being a nuisance, is an important restraint on the greed of the political class. Simply stated, politicians are less like to over-tax and over-spend if they know that geese with the golden eggs can fly across the…
The Toulouse Child Killer: Another Case of Welfare Being Used to Subsidize Terrorism?
I’m not a big fan of welfare programs, in part because I sympathize with taxpayers (check out these outrageous examples of waste) but mostly because redistribution programs subsidize poverty and trap people in lives of despair. But as I wrote in 2010, the most…