One of the many disappointing things about Republicans is that they fail to correct problems when they get power. After the 1994 “Gingrich Revolution,” the GOP had complete control of Capitol Hill. This meant complete authority over the Congressional Budget Office and Joint Committee on Taxation. Did Republicans use this power to fire the old staff […]
read more...Unfortunately, I’m not talking about President Obama, though the current occupant of the White House could learn a lot from a previous Democratic President.
read more...One of the main factors determining incumbent election success is economic performance. When disposable income is rising and people feel good about the future, it is difficult for an incumbent to lose. So why, then, is Obama pursuing policies that are undermining growth? Sure, it is in the interests of the left in the long […]
read more...In a very predictable editorial this morning, the New York Times pontificated in favor of higher taxes. Compared to Paul Krugman’s rant earlier in the week, which featured the laughable assertion that letting people keep more of the money they earn is akin to sending them a check from the government, the piece seemed rational. But […]
read more...Working in Washington is a frustrating experience for many reasons, but my personal nightmare is that bad ideas refuse to die. Keynesian economics is a perfect example. It doesn’t matter that Keynesian deficit spending didn’t work for Hoover and Roosevelt. It doesn’t matter that it didn’t work for the Japanese all through the 1990s. It […]
read more...For those who favor truth in labeling, the housing meltdown and related financial crisis and economic downturn should be brightly stamped with the phrase, “Made in Washington.” Here are two good pieces of evidence. First, this paper from the American Enterprise Institute is one of the best big-picture analyses on the issue. It identifies how […]
read more...I hope the title of this post is an exaggeration, but it’s certainly a logical conclusion based on what is written in the Congressional Budget Office’s updated Economic and Budget Outlook. The Capitol Hill bureaucracy basically has a deficit-über-alles view of fiscal policy. CBO’s long-run perspective, as shown by this excerpt, is that deficits reduce […]
read more...The news that China has surpassed Japan as the world’s second-largest economy has generated a lot of attention. It shouldn’t. There are roughly 10 times as many people in China as there are in Japan, so the fact that total gross domestic product in China is now bigger than total gross domestic product in Japan […]
read more...There’s been a bit of chatter in the blogosphere about a recent post on Ezra Klein’s blog featuring estimates from various economists about the revenue-maximizing tax rate. It won’t come as a surprise that people on the right tended to give lower estimates and folks on the left had higher guesses. Donald Luskin of National […]
read more...Using road management as an example, John Stossel explains that government does a worse job than the private sector, even at things that theoretically are a government responsibility. Part of this is because of the profit motive, to be sure, but a big reason is probably because government bureaucracies inevitably are filled with overpaid bureaucrats […]
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