I recently posted four charts eviscerating Obama’s record on jobs. My Cato colleague, Caleb Brown, has a good complement to those charts. He’s put together a short video looking at how government spending and regulation undermine job creation. Caleb says he will be…
Daily Analysis
Grading the Likely Components of Obama’s New Stimulus Plan
President Obama will be unveiling another “jobs plan” tomorrow night, though Democrats are being careful not to call it stimulus after the failure of the $800 billion package from 2008. But just as a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, bigger government is…
Obama’s Failure on Jobs: Four Damning Charts
President Obama may have a buddy-buddy relationship with big labor, but he’s no friend to ordinary workers. Here are four damning pieces of evidence. 1. The unemployment rate remains above 9 percent according to the Labor Department data released on Friday. This is…
The Role of Unions in a Free Society
Labor Day is a good opportunity to consider whether unions help or hurt ordinary workers in America. The answer is yes and no, depending on circumstances, but that’s actually the wrong question. The real issue, at least from a public policy perspective, is whether…
Disaster Keynesianism Follows in Irene’s Wake
Disaster Keynesianism is the moniker I’ve given to the belief that destruction from natural disaster promotes prosperity. It is the logical extension of standard Keynesianism, which holds that any government spending is a boost to growth, and the various voodoo…
Let’s Send Obama to the Vatican for an Economics Lesson
I’m normally disappointed when religious figures comment on economics, particularly since they often turn the individual call to charity into a blank check for government-coerced redistribution. This runs contrary to individual choice, free will, and morality. So I’m…
Another Fed-Bashing Video
I generally try to avoid commenting on monetary policy. Not because I don’t have opinions, but for the simple reason that I don’t follow the issue closely enough to feel fully confident about what I say. This doesn’t mean I’m happy with Fed Chairman Bernanke. But I’m…
New CBO Numbers Confirm – Once Again – that Modest Spending Restraint Can Balance the Budget
The Congressional Budget Office has just released the update to its Economic and Budget Outlook. There are several things from this new report that probably deserve commentary, including a new estimate that unemployment will “remain above 8 percent until 2014.” This…
Is Obama Really Going to Propose another Keynesian Stimulus?
ust last week, I made fun of Paul Krugman after he publicly said that a fake threat from invading aliens would be good for the economy since the earth would waste a bunch of money on pointless defense outlays. Yesterday, there were rumors that Krugman stated that it…
What’s Better for Poor People, Economic Growth or Redistribution?
I took part in a thirty-minute online Skype debate for PBS on income inequality, and they boiled it down to the 4:44 youtube video embedded below. You probably won’t be surprised to learn that I said economic growth was the key. I don’t want to re-slice the pie. I…