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 […]
read more...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 […]
read more...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 […]
read more...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 […]
read more...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 […]
read more...Since I don’t like nuisance taxation and mindless bureaucracy, I’ve never been a big fan of having to get a license for pet dogs and cats. But the folks across the pond have pushed this to a new level and are considering licenses for dog owners. These so-called competency tests in the United Kingdom are […]
read more...A former reporter for the New York Times, Fox Butterfield, became a bit of a laughingstock in the 1990s for publishing a series of articles addressing the supposed quandary of how crime rates could be falling during periods when prison populations were expanding. A number of critics sarcastically explained that crimes rates were falling because […]
read more...Since many of the politicians want America to be more like Europe (including full government-run healthcare), it’s worth contemplating what that would mean for the economy. America today is richer than Europe. Indeed, per-capita living standards are about 30 percent higher in the United States – and that’s according to the statists at the Paris-based […]
read more...There doesn’t seem to be much union in the European Union. Greek politicians are wetting their pants that Germany isn’t bending over fast enough to provide bailout money, so they pulled out the Nazi card. I’m sure the Germans raped Greece during World War II, but that does not explain why German taxpayers are responsible […]
read more...I posted an amusing (and disappointing) graph in January showing how economists consistently failed to predict major changes in GDP. Russ Roberts of George Mason University explains that we should blame the practitioners of macroeconomics. They want the profession to be a hard science like physics, and some of them dream of the day when […]
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