I don’t have strong feelings about Sarah Palin, but I like her anti-establishment attitude. And, in a case of strange bedfellows, so does the New York Times. Or at least one columnist is honest enough to admit when she makes a compelling argument. Here’s an excerpt…
Daily Analysis
The Obama Presidency: From Tragedy to Farce
Herman Cain probably had the best reaction to the President’s speech: “We waited 30 months for this?” My reaction yesterday was mixed. In some sense, I was almost embarrassed for the President. He demanded a speech to a joint session of Congress and then produced a…
Government and Job Creation: Help or Hindrance?
I recently posted four charts eviscerating Obama’s record on jobs. My Cato colleague, Caleb Brown, has a good complement to those charts. He’s put together a short video looking at how government spending and regulation undermine job creation. Caleb says he will be…
Grading the Likely Components of Obama’s New Stimulus Plan
President Obama will be unveiling another “jobs plan” tomorrow night, though Democrats are being careful not to call it stimulus after the failure of the $800 billion package from 2008. But just as a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, bigger government is…
Bloomberg’s Flawed Response to Social Security Shortfall: Americans Should Pay More and Get Less
The editors at Bloomberg have decided that condemning younger workers to a more dismal future is the best way to deal with the Social Security program’s giant long-run shortfall. They want workers to pay higher taxes to prop up the bankrupt system. And, in exchange…
From the U.K., another Great Moment in Government-Run Healthcare
I’ve written several times about the sometimes-deadly shortcomings of government-run healthcare in the United Kingdom (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here), so I like to think I’m relatively immune to being surprised. But this story from the…
Obama’s Failure on Jobs: Four Damning Charts
President Obama may have a buddy-buddy relationship with big labor, but he’s no friend to ordinary workers. Here are four damning pieces of evidence. 1. The unemployment rate remains above 9 percent according to the Labor Department data released on Friday. This is…
The Role of Unions in a Free Society
Labor Day is a good opportunity to consider whether unions help or hurt ordinary workers in America. The answer is yes and no, depending on circumstances, but that’s actually the wrong question. The real issue, at least from a public policy perspective, is whether…
Are Tax Havens Moral or Immoral?
Being the world’s self-appointed defender of so-called tax havens has led to some rather bizarre episodes. The bureaucrats at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development threatened to have me thrown in a Mexican jail for the horrible crime of standing in…
Great Moments in Government Stupidity
Do you want drunk truck drivers barreling down the highway? Probably not, but the government does. That’s a bit of hyperbole, but it’s not an unreasonable interpretation of a lawsuit filed by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The EEOC is upset that a…