Tim Carney of the Washington Examiner has a great piece looking at the utterly indefensible panoply of ethanol subsidies and handouts that screw consumers and taxpayers in order to line the pockets of the politically powerful. Unfortunately, several senior GOP…
Daily Analysis
Debunking White House Pro-Tax Increase Propaganda
The White House recently released a video, narrated by Austan Goolsbee of the Council of Economic Advisers, asserting that higher tax rates on the so-called rich would be a good idea. Since Goolsbee’s video made so many unsubstantiated assertions and was guilty of so…
Banning Happy Meal Toys in San Francisco
Reason TV has a new video in their great Nanny-of-the-Month series. The winner is a San Francisco politician who pushed through legislation to ban restaurants like McDonald’s from including toys in happy meals. Here’s a great idea: How about banning politicians from…
Should the Fed Print More Money?
Chairman Ben Bernanke has announced that the Federal Reserve will buy about $600 billion of government bonds as part of what is being called QE2 (because this is the second big stage of “quantitative easing”). This actually isn’t printing money, but it has the same…
Global Taxation: An Idea so Terrible that Even the Obama Administration Is Opposed
The old saying that “two wrongs don’t make a right” is especially true in the field of public policy. A good example is the crazy new proposal from the United Nations to collect billions of dollars by imposing global taxes on financial transactions and energy. That’s…
Can You Name the Hate-Filled, Racist, Right-Wing, Tea-Party Fanatic Who Said This?
At a recent speech in Atlanta, a somewhat famous former elected official made some rather blunt comments about welfare. According to a news report: In discussing welfare, he said rules instituted by liberals to limit benefits to single mothers discouraged blacks from…
Crazy Environmentalists Launch Anti-Bathing Campaign
Last year, I commented on a handful of crazed environmentalists who were sterilizing themselves because children boost carbon emissions. I thought this was a wonderful form of natural selection since it meant at least some statists weren’t passing on their…um…peculiar…
How Welfare Destroys the Human Spirit
This isn’t a video produced by an anti-welfare group. It’s not even from the United States. Instead, you’re looking at a straight news clip from England that unintentionally offers a very powerful example of how welfare saps initiative, creates dependency, subsidizes…
Health Care Karma
AARP’s support was instrumental in getting Obamacare passed. Now they’re raising the price of insurance for their employees because of the massive tax on so-called “Cadillac” plans that it included. In an e-mail to employees, AARP says health care premiums will…
What Happens When Politicians Get a New Source of Revenue?
We’ve been spending too much time on elections, so let’s get back to pointing out inane, foolish, and destructive government policies. Our latest example comes from the United Kingdom, where politicians are pushing airline ticket taxes to punitive levels and harming…