I’ve written, ad nauseum, about the economic impact of excessive government spending. But I’ve also acknowledged that Article I, Section VIII of the Constitution grants specific powers to the federal government. What I’ve neglected to explore, though, is the key issue…
Daily Analysis
A Four-Picture Indictment: Final Pre-Election Jobs Report Is Not Good News for Obama
In some sense, the President is fortunate. I predicted a long time ago that he would win re-election if the unemployment rate was under 8 percent. Well, the new numbers just came out and the joblessness rate is 7.9 percent. So even though his stimulus failed, and even…
New International Monetary Fund Study Inadvertently Provides Very Strong Evidence against the Value-Added Tax
I’m not a big fan of the International Monetary Fund, largely because the folks in charge oftentimes advocate toxic policies such as bailouts, higher taxes, and currency devaluation. But there are some top-rate economists working at the IMF, and the bureaucracy has…
Is There a Libertarian Argument for another Four Years of Barack Obama?!?
From a rational perspective, the logical choice is not voting. After all, the odds of your vote making a difference are infinitesimally small. But that’s if you view voting as an “investment” choice – i.e., you taking time and effort to do X in hopes of getting Y in…
The Fiscal Burden of the Welfare State: A Picture Says a Thousand Words
Here’s a remarkable chart showing that we spend about $60,000 on various welfare programs for every poor household in America. And what are we getting for that giant expenditure of money? Well, as this other chart shows, our progress in the fight against poverty came…
Free Markets Protect Consumers with “Mutually Reinforcing” Private Regulation
I’ve written before about the heavy costs of regulation, including these rather sobering statistics. Or, to be more accurate, here are some staggering numbers. Americans spend 8.8 billion hours every year filling out government forms. The economy-wide cost of…
Rewarding Hospitals to Let Old People Die? That’s the Wrong Way to Cut Government Spending
I used to think I was in favor of every possible step to reduce the burden of government spending. Are agricultural subsidies wasteful and corrupt? Yes, so get rid of the Department of Agriculture. Is Medicaid spending out of control? Yes, so cap outlay growth and…
What’s the Best Way of Achieving Good Fiscal Policy?
The half-joking response to the question in the title of this post is that policymakers should look at what’s happening in poorly run jurisdictions such as California, France, Illinois, and Greece – and then do just the opposite. In other words, steer clear of…
Is America in Worse Fiscal Shape than Europe?
I’ve shared BIS and OECD data showing that the United States has a bigger long-run fiscal burden than Europe. That’s a bit of a strained comparison since “Europe” includes fiscally responsible countries such as Switzerland and Estonia, but also soon-to-be failed…
Even Leftists Won’t Defend Obama’s Make-Believe $4 Trillion “Grand Bargain” Budget Plan
You have to give President Obama credit for chutzpah. He pushed through a faux stimulus in his first year and Obamacare in his second year, both of which significantly increased the burden of government spending. In the past two years, he’s basically punted, proposing…