While American politicians are experts when it comes to squandering money, they may be just amateurs compared to the kleptocrats at the European Commission. The overall burden of government is heavier in Europe, so that certainly suggests that there are greater opportunities to waste money, but what makes the European Commission special is that it […]

In the ongoing contest to see which group of politicians can squander money in the most obscene fashion, it appears that the bureaucrats at the European Commission in Brussels might be surpassing their counterparts in Washington. Here’s a story from the UK’s Daily Telegraph, reporting that the European Commission is subsidizing a ski trip for […]

The Wall Street Journal has more details about the sordid redistribution of our money to the insiders at Fannie Mae and Freddie mac: …there’s still some ugly 2009 business to report: To wit, the Treasury’s Christmas Eve taxpayer massacre lifting the $400 billion cap on potential losses for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as well as the […]

One of the dirty little secrets of Washington is that Republicans and Democrats have more in common with each other than either party has with ordinary Americans. Tim Carney has an excellent (but depressing) column in the Washington Examiner exposing how both Democrat and Republican lobbyists are raking in big buck from General Motors, even […]

Ever since the Supreme Court’s odious Kelo decision, which allowed a city in Connecticut to seize a woman’s home for the benefit of a politically-connected big corporation, there has been a deep concern that this would open the door to more examples of government-sanctioned theft. George Will is particularly (and appropriately) vicious in his analysis […]

Let’s give some credit to the Cornhusker state. As John Fund reports in the Wall Street Journal voters are overwhelmingly opposed to Obamacare – even though their state would get a big pile of money from taxpayers in the other 49 states. Meanwhile, the Senator who is trying to deliver the loot, Senator Nelson, is trailing a […]

Writing for Forbes, Bruce Bartlett puts forth an interesting hypothesis that healthcare legislation could have been made better (hopefully he meant to write “less destructive”) if the GOP had been willing to compromise with Democrats: Democrats desperately wanted a bipartisan bill and would have given a lot to get a few Republicans on board. This undoubtedly would […]

Good news for entrepreneurs and investors, at least the ones who are very sick. As of January 1, the death tax is repealed. But this silver cloud has a couple of dark linings. First, the tax springs back to life next January 1, so healthy taxpayers are out of luck. Second, the grave-robber politicians may […]

A column in the Wall Street Journal reports on a new study showing that people tend to be unhappiest in high-tax states. This type of research is very imprecise, to be sure, and it may be that the causality (if any) is that unhappy people vote for higher taxes. The most persuasive part of the […]

A column in the Washington Examiner compares the bloated payrolls and happy times for the bureaucracy with the challenging times for workers in the productive sector of the economy. The column does not mention that bureaucrats also are vastly overpaid compared to private sector workers: It looks like a happy new year for you — if […]