The headlines from today’s employment report certainly seem positive. The unemployment rate has dropped to 6.3 percent and there are about 280,000 new jobs.* But if you dig into the details of the latest numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, you find some…
Daily Analysis
Obamacare: The Never-Ending Gift that Repeatedly Teaches Us that Big Government Doesn’t Work
Sigh. Another day, another grim Obamacare update. Actually, we have two updates on the never-ending disaster of government-run healthcare. Our first story comes from the Washington Times, which reports that the company hired to fix the failed Obamacare website is way…
Ukraine’s Self-Imposed Statism Crisis
Using a comparison of Jamaica and Singapore, I recently argued that growth should trump inequality. Simply stated, a growing economic pie is much better for poor people that incentive-sapping redistribution programs that trap people in dependency. In other words,…
A Case Study of Why Growth Trumps Inequality
There’s a new book by French economist Thomas Piketty, called “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” that supposedly identifies the Achilles’ Heel of the market economy. Piketty argues that the rate of return to capital is higher than the economy-wide growth rate and…
America Should Copy Europe…if the Goal Is Stagnation and Lower Living Standards
I periodically (some would say over and over and over again, though occasionally made more palatable by using humor and cartoons) warn that the United States should not become a European-style welfare state. But I wonder whether I spend enough time explaining why this…
Bragging about the Debt Brake…but Failing to Explain What Makes It Successful
What happens when you mix something good with something bad? To be more specific, what happens when you have a big success story, like the spending cap in Switzerland that has dramatically slowed the growth of government, and then expect intelligent and coherent…
America’s Most Clueless and Malicious Bureaucrats?
I’ve already suggested that subsidies for the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development are the most wasteful and counterproductive item in the federal budget. At least on a per-dollar-spent basis. But what about a similar exercise for…
Beware Government ‘Innovation’
The other ‘death panel.’
Statists Propose to Punish Success as Inequality Fix
Thomas Picketty has received a lot of attention for his attack on capitalism. His new book Capital in the Twenty-first Century has breathed new life into old Marxist critiques of capitalism, and been elevated to the status of very important book by the designated…
Debating How Best to Create Jobs: Markets or Government?
Early last month, I wrote an article for The Federalist on job creation. I used that opportunity to document that there is a serious problem with jobs under Obama, and I explained that the problem existed in part because the President was intervening with so-called…