As illustrated by this chart, economists are lousy forecasters. To be more specific, economists are no better than fortune tellers when trying to make short-run macroeconomic forecasts. Heck, if we actually knew what was going to happen over the next 12 months, we’d all be billionaires. But we can (on occasion) make sensible predictions about […]

About two years ago, I shared a map put together by a pro-statism organization that supposedly showed that welfare benefits were very miserly and not sufficiently generous to lift people out of poverty. My gut instinct was to reject the findings. As I wrote at the time: The poverty line is set considerably above a […]

As regular readers know, one of my great challenges in life is trying to educate policy makers about the Laffer Curve, which is simply a way of illustrating that government won’t collect any revenue if tax rates are zero, but also won’t collect much revenue if tax rates are 100 percent. After all, very few […]

Government officials do some really crazy things in the name of law enforcement. I recently wrote about an armed raid on an animal shelter in order to execute a baby deer. That was paramilitary overkill (pun intended), though it probably didn’t waste as many tax dollars as the regulatory overkill of the year-long sting operation […]

There’s an old joke that the definition of quandary is when your mother-in-law drives off a cliff in your new car. But since I’m not married, I can’t use that joke. Besides, I’m a policy wonk, so the type of quandary that catches my attention is when the Obama Administration delays big parts of Obamacare […]

The United States is suffering through the weakest economic expansion since the Great Depression, which is a damning indictment of Obamanomics. But that doesn’t mean the United States has the world’s worst-performing economy. Japan’s statist economy has been mired in stagnation for more than 20 years, which is about what you might expect in a […]

As a fiscal policy economist, one of my responsibilities is to educate policy makers about the impact of taxation. Simply stated, I try to help them understand that taxes alter behavior. If you tax something at a higher rate, you get less of whatever is being taxed. Politicians actually understand this basic lesson when it […]

It’s probably not an exaggeration to say that the United States has the world’s worst corporate tax system. We definitely have the highest corporate tax rate in the developed world, and we may have the highest corporate tax rate in the entire world depending on how one chooses to classify the tax regime in an […]