In my fiscal policy speeches, I sometimes try to get a laugh out of audiences by including a Powerpoint slide with this image. Leading up to this slide, I talk about the Armey/Forbes flat tax and explain that it would eliminate the corrupt internal revenue code and…
Daily Analysis
Everything You Need to Know about Healthcare Economics in One Chart
The title of this post may be a slight exaggeration. I actually recommend you read the entire two-page paper by Devon Herrick of the National Center for Policy Analysis. But this chart from that study is an excellent visual display of what’s wrong with the health care…
Someone Tell Bernanke You Don’t Cure Bad Fiscal Policy with Bad Monetary Policy
Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke is at it again, giving an interview that combines all of the worst features of Keynesian economics. I have an excerpt below from a New York Times report, which features an amazing amount of mistakes in a very short amount of space. Here are thr…
Words I Don’t Say Very Often: “I Applaud Senate Republicans”
Much to my surprise, Senate Republicans held firm earlier today and blocked President Obama’s soak-the-rich proposal to raise tax rates next year on investors, entrepreneurs, and small business owners. I fully expected that GOPers would fold on this issue several…
Great Video Exposing Failures of the Federal Reserve
Thanks to the folks at the Mises Institute, Professor George Selgin of the University of Georgia (!) has a superb presentation on the failings of the Federal Reserve. George was one of my professors at George Mason University back in the 1980s and is one of the…
How’s that Stimulus Working, Mr. President?
The Bureau of Labor Statistics announced this morning that the unemployment rate jumped to 9.8 percent last month. As you can see from the chart, the White House claimed that if we enacted the so-called stimulus, the unemployment rate today would be about 7 percent….
Fiscal Commission Is Using Washington’s Dishonest Budget Math
The Chairmen of President Obama’s Fiscal Commission have a new draft proposal that is filled, according to Reuters, with “sharp spending and benefit cuts.”
That’s music to my ears, so I quickly flipped to the back of the report in hopes of finding hard number…
Are House Republicans already Selling Out?!?
I don’t want to give anyone indigestion, but The Hill is reporting that GOPers on Capitol Hill want to require insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions, which is one of the key provisions of Obamacare. Speaking to more than 100 students at American…
A Long-Overdue Debunking of Keynesian Economics
I’m understandably fond of my video exposing the flaws of Keynesian stimulus theory, but I think my former intern has a great contribution to the debate with this new 5-minute mini-documentary. You may recognize Hiwa. She narrated a very popular video earlier this…
The Pilgrims Learned from Their Mistakes, so Why Can’t Obama?
There’s an odd debate in the blogosphere. As happens every Thanksgiving, libertarians and conservatives take joy in pointing out that there was mass starvation and suffering during the early years of the Plymouth Colony because of a socialist economic model. Here’s…