One of my frustrating missions in life is to educate policy makers on the Laffer Curve. This means teaching folks on the left that tax policy affects incentives to earn and report taxable income. As such, I try to explain, this means it is wrong to assume a simplistic…
Politicians in Europe have spent decades creating a fiscal crisis by violating Mitchell’s Golden Rule and letting the government grow faster than the private sector. As a result, government is far too big today, and nations such as Greece are in the process of fiscal…
Last year, I reported on a study from the Small Business Administration that estimated that federal regulation costs the economy a staggering $1.75 trillion every year. But that number is so large that it’s hard to understand what it actually means, so let’s look at…
Gregory H. Friedman, Inspector General for the Department of Energy, testified before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee this morning (Hat-tip: Adam Peshek at the Reason Foundation). Not only was the stimulus based upon bad Keynesian economics, but…
Last week in New York City, during my Intelligence Squared debate about stimulus, I pointed out that Germany is doing better than the United States and explained that they largely avoided any Bush/Obama Keynesian spending binges. One of my opponents disagreed and…
I have sometimes wondered whether it is accurate to say that Republicans are the “Stupid Party.” We’ll soon know the answer to that question. As part of the debt limit agreement, the politicians agreed to set up a “Supercommittee” comprised of six Republicans and six…
Here’s an absolutely horrifying video of President Franklin Roosevelt promoting a “Second Bill of Rights” based on coercive redistribution. At first, I was going to post it and contrast it with this superb Reagan video and compare how one President’s policies kept…
A couple of weeks ago, I proposed a “Golden Rule of Fiscal Policy” that was probably a bit too wordy. Good fiscal policy exists when the private sector grows faster than the public sector, while fiscal ruin is inevitable if government spending grows faster than the…
I’ve criticized the Congressional Budget Office for generating biased and inaccurate numbers. These are the clowns, after all, who say deficit spending stimulates the economy in the short run but they also rely on a model which seemingly predicts 100 percent tax rates…
Professor Allan Meltzer of Carnegie Mellon University has a must-read column in today’s Wall Street Journal, beginning with what should be an obvious statement. Those who heaped high praise on Keynesian policies have grown silent as government spending has failed to…