The geniuses in Washington have come up with a great idea to attract more tourists to the United States. Yes, you guessed correctly. The politicians are going to impose a tax! Normal readers are probably scratching their heads about the logic of attracting visitors by making them pay more, but it all makes sense when […]

Only the government could fire someone for “serious abuses” and yet allow that person to collect an extra $550,000 of taxpayer money for “unused vacation” – even though he had six times as many carryover days as the rules allow. This is a nauseating example of why California is facing a fiscal crisis:  Amid a […]

 After looking at the “humor” section of the archives and finding this post, a reader emailed to reminisce about a very funny Dave Barry column from the 1990s that made fun of bureaucratic stupidity. After a bit of digging, I found a link. Here’s my favorite part of the column, but I encourge you to […]

President Obama is proposing a series of major tax increases. His budget envisions higher tax rates on personal income, increased double taxation of dividends and capital gains, and a big increase in the death tax. And his health care plan includes significant tax hikes, including perhaps the imposition of the Medicare payroll tax on capital […]

In addition to being in favor of more spending, increased regulation, bailouts, and protectionism, President Bush also saddled the economy with a big minimum wage increase. A new study shows that this pernicious policy has destroyed more than 500,000 part-time jobs. One of the most interesting insights in the report is that the economy (prior […]

  Fiscal crises have a predictable pattern. Step 1 occurs when the economy is prospering and tax revenues are growing faster than forecast. Step 2 is when politicians use the additional money to increase government spending. Step 3 is that politicians do not treat the extra tax revenue like a temportary windfall and budget accordingly. Instead, they adopt […]

President Obama and many other politicians in Washington are big fans of pay-as-you-go budgeting, which means they want any new spending or tax relief offset (or “paid for”) with tax increases or spending cuts from other parts of the budget. Or at least that’s what they claim. But when Senator Bunning took them at their […]

Politicians like to play a class-warfare game of demonizing rich people. Walter Williams explains, though, that rich people can only do bad things to us if they are conspiring with politicians. The moral of the story, of course, is that government is a threat to our freedom and liberty: Bill Gates is the world’s richest […]

Pulling no punches, Mark Steyn ponders the entitlement-driven collapse of Greece and asks why politicians in America are repeating the same mistakes:  Chapter One (the introduction of unsustainable entitlements) leads eventually to Chapter Twenty (total societal collapse): The Greeks are at Chapter Seventeen or Eighteen. What’s happening in the developed world today isn’t so very […]

For those of you who saw this segment of Wednesday’s show on CNBC, my co-host got quite agitated when I said I did not want America to have a substandard government-dictated healthcare system. Simon expressed doubt about my assertions, so it’s rather serendipitous that Investor’s Business Daily just editorialized about a new report (from the […]