I’ve certainly complained about Obamacare from a fiscal perspective, warning that it means higher taxes and more spending. And I’ve also warned that it will make our health care system less efficient and could lead to some of the horrifying examples of rationing and…
Daily Analysis
President Obama Is MIA on Fiscal Policy
I feel like a pendulum this election season. Something will happen that makes me want to eviscerate Obama’s statist policies and I’ll write a foaming-at-the-mouth post warning that the President is turning America into Greece. But then Romney will do something odious…
It’s Not April Fool’s Day, but New York Times Columnist Wants America to Become More Prosperous by Raising Taxes on the Middle Class and Becoming More Like Italy
Every so often, you read something so ridiculously stupid and absurd that you assume that you’re being pranked. So you look to the date of the article to see if it says April 1. Or you look at the Internet address to see if it’s a parody of a real website. So when I…
Explaining Ryan’s Budget in the Wall Street Journal
Even though I’ve already made clear that I am less-than-overwhelmed by the thought of Mitt Romney in the White House, I worry that people will become to think I’m a GOP toady. That’s because I’ve been spending a lot of time providing favorable analysis and commentary…
Correcting a Massive Typo by USA Today
Although this line is attributed to many people, Wikiquote says that Gideon Tucker was the first to warn us that “No man’s life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session.” This cartoon about Keynesian economics sort of makes the same point,…
Auto Bailout Cost Climbs to $25 Billion, Yet Obama Thinks It Is a Success and Threatens to Do the Same for Other Industries
I’ve been against the auto bailout from the very beginning because it was a corrupt payoff to lazy corporate fat-cats and an ossified union. And when folks on the left say the bailout is a success, I explain that any industry can be propped up with a sufficiently…
Social Security’s $30 Trillion Fiscal Time Bomb
I don’t give the issue much attention on this blog, but I’m very interested in Social Security reform. I wrote my dissertation on Australia’s very successful system of personal retirement accounts, for instance, and I narrated this video on Social Security reform in…
OECD Presses Big Government Agenda
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is heavily subsidized by US taxpayers, but spends a lot of time pushing an agenda against taxpayer interests. Richard Billies recently did a good job recounting the OECD’s ongoing list of big…
New Video Is a Strong Indictment of Obama’s Dismal Record on Spending
The burden of federal spending in the United States was down to 18.2 percent of gross domestic product when Bill Clinton left office. But this progress didn’t last long. Thanks to George Bush’s reckless spending policies, the federal budget grew about twice as fast as…
Just as Happened in Europe, the VAT Is Becoming a Money Machine for Big Govenrment in Japan
For years, I’ve been warning that a value-added tax (VAT) would be a terrible idea. Simply stated, politicians would have no reason to control spending or reform entitlements if they had a new source of tax revenue. In this video, I explain why this European-style…