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…
Daily Analysis
An Indictment of Barack Obama’s Economic Record
In a recent post comparing Reaganomics and Obamanomics, I explained why I think Barack Obama’s policies have been hurting the economy. In today’s New York Post, I do a full-scale indictment. Here are my bullet points. * The unemployment rate is still above 8 percent,…
The Big Debate for U.S. News: Have Obama’s Policies Helped or Hurt the Economy?
n previous posts, I’ve used data from the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank to show how Obamanomics is leading to very weak results, particularly compared to the economic boom triggered by Reaganomics. So you can imagine how I was anxious to participate when U.S. News…
By Restraining Burden of Federal Spending, Senator Paul Shows How It’s Simple to Balance the Budget
Last year, while lounging on the beach in the Caribbean…oops, I mean while doing off-site research, I developed the first iteration of a rule to describe how fiscal policy should operate. Good fiscal policy exists when the private sector grows faster than the public…
Should Politicians Go on Trial for Economic Negligence?
I like to think I despise politicians more than 99.9 percent of the population. Even in my kindest moments, I see them as occasionally well-intentioned souls who are easily corrupted. Most of the time, they are a plague on society, as this cartoon illustrates. So you…
A Fiscal Policy Tutorial: Everything You Need to Know about the Economics of Government Spending
Almost exactly one year ago, I did a post entitled “A Laffer Curve Tutorial” because I wanted readers to have all the arguments and data in one place (and also because it meant I wouldn’t have to track down all the videos when someone asked me for the full set)….
To Boost Obama’s Redistribution Agenda, OECD Pushes Crazy Assertion that Poverty Is Higher in the U.S. than in Greece, Hungary, Portugal, and Turkey
Supporters of individual liberty and national sovereignty have been skeptical of the United Nations, and with good reason. With the support of statists such as George Soros, the U.N. pushes for crazy ideas such as global taxation and global currency. But there’s…
If Even the International Monetary Fund Acknowledges the Laffer Curve, Why Doesn’t Obama Realize that Higher Tax Rates are All Pain and No Gain?
I speculated last year that the political elite finally might be realizing that higher tax rates are not the solution to Greece’s fiscal situation. Simply stated, you can only squeeze so much blood out of a stone, and pushing tax rates higher cripples growth and…
What’s the Recipe for Growth and Prosperity?
What is the best way improve economic performance and boost living standards? If you listen to politicians, they would like us to think that adopting Policy A or repealing Policy B is a magic elixir. And if that means adopting a flat tax or repealing Obamacare, I’ll…
Why Won’t Washington Understand that Paying People to Be Unemployed Means More Unemployment?
I’ve written periodically about the perverse incentives of the unemployment insurance system. Simply stated, there will be fewer jobs if the government subsidizes joblessness, and I even showed that this is a consensus position by citing the academic writings of…