I’m out in Sin City for the annual FreedomFest conference, where I moderated a debate earlier today on whether consumer spending or investment spending was the key to economic growth. As you can imagine, it was horribly painful for me to keep from injecting my two…
Daily Analysis
Great Moments in Government Waste
Politicians often talk about the supposed value of federally-funded research and development, which sometimes sounds like a good idea to people unfamiliar with the incompetence, inefficiency, red tape, and bureaucracy of even well-intentioned programs. But it turns…
Jilted Basketball Fans Should Blame the Income Tax, not LeBron James
Supporters of the Cleveland Cavaliers, especially the owner of the team, are upset that basketball superstar LeBron James has decided to sign with the Miami Heat. The anger is especially intense because the Cavaliers offered $4 million more over the next five years….
Obama Is Greedy, not Racist
The Washington Post has a story, excerpted below, about people who think the tanning tax is racist because it targets a service used overwhelmingly by white people. And while some critics make a good point about how that would be the story if there was a tax on a…
Sexual and Racial Quotas and the Dodd-Frank Bailout Bill
Diana Furchtgott-Roth of the Hudson Institute provides an additional reason why the Dodd-Frank bailout legislation is bad for the American economy. But this shouldn’t be too surprising. Senator Dodd and Congressman Frank are akin to a couple of foxes designing rules…
Bashing Bush-Obama Statism on CNBC
In a debate with one of the hopeless ideologues from the Center for American Progress, I criticize the corrupt deals between big government and big business, I warn about the big tax increases scheduled to take effect next year, I explain that Republicans did Obama a…
A Picture Says a Thousand Words
Here’s a depressing chart prepared by Veronique de Rugy of the Mercatus Center. But we don’t need a thousand words to say that the long-run prognosis for America will be grim if government continues to expand faster than the productive sector of the economy. This is…
I Don’t Think Merkel is the new Reagan, but I May Change My Mind if This is True
I’ve been very dismissive of supposed European “austerity” initiatives, in part because the term seems to describe politicians who want tax-financed government spending rather than Keynesian-style deficit-financed government spending. But what really matters is…
Public Knows Better than Congress
The statists in Congress are enamored with Keynesian big government policies and profligate spending as a means of “stimulus.” But while they travel the country to tout so-called “stimulus success,” the public displays a far better…
The Nanny State and Toxic Light Bulbs
Deroy Murdock explains in National Review how politicians in Washington have imposed legislation – which most Americans still don’t know about – to ban traditional light bulbs. As American as the grand slam, the Mustang convertible, and the constitutional republic,…