I have a column in the New York Post explaining that big government is a losing deal for taxpayers in the Empire State. I’m tempted to say they deserve to be over-taxed and over-regulated because they keep electing collectivists like Chuck Schumer, but I grew up in the area and still follow the Yankees, so […]

Steve Forbes is 100 percent correct, as was Milton Friedman. Bloated and wasteful government spending is the problem, not inadequate revenue. Deficits are merely the symptom of excessive spending: The late Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman once famously observed that he would prefer a federal government budget of $1 trillion (this was when a trillion […]

Last Thursday, the Senate took a vote on a non-binding “sense of the Senate” resolution concerning a Value Added Tax.  The result was an 85-13 victory for the anti-VAT side.  The roll call can be found here.  The statement of purpose read as follows:  Expressing the sense of the Senate that the Value Added Tax […]

The serial mendacity that characterizes Washington is on full display in David Border’s column entitled “Without higher taxes, the national debt will be crushing.” Yes, this is the same David Broder who did not write columns about the threat of deficits and debt when politicians were bailing out their friends on Wall Street. Moreover, this […]

A former White House speechwriter, Mark Thiessen, has jumped to the defense of his former boss, writing for the Washington Post that George W. Bush “established a conservative record without parallel.” Even by the loose standards of Washington, that is a jaw-dropping assertion. I’ve been explaining for years that Bush was a big-government advocate, even writing […]

I saw this odd story about wasteful government spending in James Taranto’s Best of the Web email. The bureaucrats at Britain’s National Health Service are sqandering thousands of dollars to create a giant “Burger Boy” as part of a government propoganda program against obesity. But what’s really odd is that local taxpayers (if there are […]

A great column in the Wall Street Journal explains how FDR’s policies hurt the economy. That is true, but the really interesting part of the column for me is that it explains how Roosevelt (and then Truman) were convinced the economy would return to depression after World War II unless there was another giant Keynesian […]

Caroline Baum of Bloomberg has a good column against the value-added tax, in part because she quotes me, but more so because she effectively explains that a national sales tax like the VAT would be an add-on tax that would finance much bigger government:  As Americans awake to the 2009 tax-filing deadline today, they can […]

 Clemson University was a big rival when I was at the University of Georgia, so it seems natural that I am locking horns with someone from that school as we debate whether we should have a flat tax or the current system. You can see both arguments at this link, and there also is a […]

I have a column in the Washington Times speculating on ways we could lower our tax bills if we could use the same creative accounting that the Congressional Budget Office and Joint Committee on Taxation used to help impose Obamacare on the nation: If you’re still struggling over your tax return, wondering why you pay […]