Daily Analysis

Paying for Pro-Bureaucrat Propoganda.

The government is wasting so much money in so many ways that it takes something really odd to shock me, but this story from the Federal Times certainly meets that test. The Office of Personnel Management is actually squandering money on a marketing campaign to improve…

Yes, Taxes Change Behavior.

 I’ve read several places that Ronald Reagan instinctively understood supply-side economics because Hollywood stars sooner or later learned that making more than a couple of movies per year was pointless when marginal tax rates were 90 percent. The same thing…

Government Corruption Watch, Part IV.

Since the United States is the biggest funder of that bevy of kleptocrats and moochers known as the United Nations, it is especially painful to read stories about the rampant corruption that characterizes that international bureaucracy and its various divisions….

A Sordid Combination of Tax Greed and Protectionist.

Tax-news.com reports that the French and Italian governments want Europe to impose a tax on imports from nations that don’t adopt misguided climate-change/global-warming rules. This is awful policy, but the good news is that such a policy presumably won’t…

America's Fiscal Problem Is Spending, not Deficits.

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…

Vast Majority of the Senate Appears to be Against a VAT.

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…

Another Dishonest Deficit Hypocrite

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…

Bush Was a Statist, not a Conservative

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…