Big Government bailouts haven’t just been directed toward businesses and Wall Street, they’ve also been deployed to prop up Big Governments.  Having taken “stimulus” money while fully aware that it was a one-time windfall, politicians in many state capitals went ahead and spent as if it was a dedicated revenue stream, according to the State […]

Britain’s Conservative MP Daniel Hannan, made famous in America for the viral YouTube video of his fiscal takedown of Gordon Brown, recently wrote of his regret for supporting Barack Obama in the general election of the 2008 presidential campaign.  A European politician’s opinion of America’s president really isn’t of any importance, but his chillingly accurate […]

Here’s a depressing story from the Columbus Dispatch that shows the government’s ability to be incompetent and wasteful at the same time. A labor dispute that never should have existed (but did, thanks to the incestuous relationship of unions and government) eventually led to nine employees getting paid for an entire week to take naps and […]

President Obama used his first televised speech from the Oval Office, ostensibly on the topic of the BP oil spill, to run through his usual speech-making checklist, which includes blaming Bush and beating up on idealogical straw-men, like his long ago debunked contention that there was significant “deregulation” during the previous decade.  He also continued […]

Budget wonks have long battled over the use of “static” versus “dynamic” budget scoring by agencies like the Congressional Budget Office or the Joint Committee on Taxation.  While these organizations do often consider how changes in policies affect “micro-economic” behavior, such as the likely increase in tax evasion under higher tax rates, they take a […]

Obama and the Democrats are trying to enact a third so-called stimulus (a.k.a., jobs bill). I’d make a joke about three strikes and your out, but we should remember that this is actually the fourth attempt since we should count Bush’s lame faux stimulus in 2008. In any event, one would hope people would learn that borrowing […]

I’m normally not a big fan of the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development since it is an international bureaucracy that persecutes low-tax jurisdictions. But the economists at the OECD sometimes do good work (the same can be said of the IMF and World Bank, not that this justifies taxpayers subsidies for any international […]

The Wall Street Journal wisely warns against drawing too many conclusions from one month’s job data, but they also point out that the economy is much weaker than the White House claimed – in large part because of a series of public policy decisions that have rewarded sloth and punished production. Is anyone surprised that […]

This article from the Weekly Standard almost makes me want to cry with frustration. It shows how the healthcare system generally would function in the absence of government-imposed distortions such as Medicare, Medicaid, and (especially!) the tax loophole for employer-provided insurance. Sadly, Obamacare will push the system even further in the wrong direction. And when […]

In a review of two new biographies about Ayn Rand, Charles Murray explains what made her books – particularly Atlas Shrugged – so powerful and persuasive: In 1991, the book-of-the-month club conducted a survey asking people what book had most influenced their lives. The Bible ranked number one and Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged was number […]