I’m not sure how to categorize this story from England. Local governments are surreptitiously adding microchips to garbage cans to weigh the amount of rubbish each household is unloading. It is generally thought that this is the beginning stage of a government…
Daily Analysis
Good News for American Taxpayers (in the short run), Bad News for European Taxpayers.
According to Financial Times report the politicians in Paris and Berlin want to set up some sort of European Monetary Fund to help bail out Greece and other profligate European nations. This is good news in the short run for American taxpayers since it is less likely…
Cast Your Vote on the Green Jobs Debate.
Andy Morriss, a professor at the University of Illinois Law School, is having a debate about so-called green jobs at The Economist. For some strange reason, the British magazine picked the nutjob Van Jones as his opponent (you may remember that he was forced to resign…
Mark Steyn Is 100 Percent Correct on Left's Motive for Government-Run Healthcare.
During the Cold War era, there was something known as the Brezhnev Doctrine, which was the notion that once a nation was taken over by communists, there was no going back. A similiar principle takes place in the battle between statism and freedom in America. The left…
Bureaucrats vs. Taxpayers, Part XV.
The left pretends to care about fairness, but they have no problem taking money from ordinary people to help fatten the wallets of overpaid government bureaucrats. Pat Buchanan asks what’s fair about redistributing from the poor to the rich: …government…
The Obama Administration's Dangerous Re-Definition of Poverty.
A former colleague from my days at the Heritage Foundation, Robert Rector, has a very disturbing article at National Review Online. Robert explains that the Obama Administration is putting together a new – and rigged – definition of poverty that has…
Bureaucrats vs. Taxpayers, Part XIII.
A solid analysis by a reporter finds that bureaucrats make almost $8,000 more than their private sector counterparts, but the bigger scandal is the giant gap in fringe benefits. Taxpayers cough up nearly $41,000 for every bureaucrat, but workers in the productive…
Bureaucrats vs. Taxpayers, Part XII
Only the government could fire someone for “serious abuses” and yet allow that person to collect an extra $550,000 of taxpayer money for “unused vacation” – even though he had six times as many carryover days as the rules allow. This is a…
Real World Evidence for the Laffer Curve from the Government of Washington, DC.
President Obama is proposing a series of major tax increases. His budget envisions higher tax rates on personal income, increased double taxation of dividends and capital gains, and a big increase in the death tax. And his health care plan includes significant tax…
Senator Bunning Exposes Washington's Fiscal Frauds.
President Obama and many other politicians in Washington are big fans of pay-as-you-go budgeting, which means they want any new spending or tax relief offset (or “paid for”) with tax increases or spending cuts from other parts of the budget. Or at least that’s what…