Looking at labor markets, my biggest concern is the drop in labor force participation. The data from the Labor Department on the employment-population ratio, for instance, suggest a permanent reduction in the share of the population that is working. And since economic…
Daily Analysis
Hungary Rejects OECD Call To Hike Taxes
The Bureaucrats at the OECD don’t pay any taxes on their own salaries, but they work very hard to make sure everyone else is hit with exorbitant rates. They’ve persistently fought against tax competition to make it easier for politicians to raise taxes…
To Be Genuinely Compassionate, Politicians Should Focus on Job Creation, not Unemployment Benefits
Washington is in the middle of another debate about redistributing money. But that’s hardly newsworthy. Politics, after all, is basically a never-ending racket in which insiders buy votes and accumulate power with other people’s money. The current debate about…
OECD Appeasement is a Losing Strategy
Writing for Hong Kong’s Harbour Times, CF&P President Andrew Quinlan and I recently coauthored a piece explaining why appeasing the radical demands of the OECD is a losing strategy. Simply put, the global tax collectors will not be satisfied with anything…
Special Interest Cronies Join Forces to Fight Sequester
The sequester was a victory for advocates of small government and a major defeat for the Obama administration. It was also a defeat for the special interest bottom feeders who leech off the American taxpayer. But they’re not going down quietly: The defense…
The Obama Jobs Record: Some Good News, but Only if the Bar Is Lowered
The most recent jobs report from the Labor Department contains both good news and the bad news. If you’re a glass-half-full person, you’ll want to focus on some positive trends. The joblessness rate fell to 7.5 percent, the lowest level since Obama became President….
Inequality, Redistribution, and Class Warfare
I’ve spent a lot of time debunking class-warfare tax policy, and I’ve certainly explained ’til I’m blue in the face that big government facilitates a pernicious form of corruption that enriches powerful and well-connected insiders. But I haven’t spent much time…
FATCA Overreach Will Sabotage American Global Competitiveness
If Congress set out right now to craft a law to sabotage the global competitiveness of the US economy, they’d have trouble coming up with one better than what they passed in 2010 in the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA).
If Obama Beat Hoover, So What?
You know your record as President is abysmal when supporters are reduced to touting how much better you’ve done than Herbert Hoover. But that’s where Obama is at, apparently, as historian Robert McElvaine took to the New York Times a few days ago to make…
A Four-Picture Indictment: Final Pre-Election Jobs Report Is Not Good News for Obama
In some sense, the President is fortunate. I predicted a long time ago that he would win re-election if the unemployment rate was under 8 percent. Well, the new numbers just came out and the joblessness rate is 7.9 percent. So even though his stimulus failed, and even…