David Ranson had a good column earlier this week in the Wall Street Journal explaining that federal tax revenues historically have hovered around 19 percent of gross domestic product, regardless whether tax rates are high or low. One reason for this relationship, as…
Daily Analysis
Slash Government Spending to Boost Economy
The politicians in Washington and their enablers in the academy are wildly wrong about how to boost growth. They think more government spending is a key to prosperity, but this blog already has revealed that the Great Depression was made worse because of bigger…
Get Government Out of the Education Business
There’s a controversy in Texas because the State Board of Education has mandated the inclusion of certain materials in textbooks. This has elicited howls of protests from the left, which generally has controlled how some issues are portrayed. Since I don’t want…
Obama Administration Trying to Rig Government Statistics for Ideological Purposes
The government’s so-called War on Poverty has been a dismal failure, largely because giving people money as a condition of being poor is a very good way of ensuring that some of them will choose to remain poor. But now the White House wants to make a bad situation…
You don’t need to watch old Gunsmoke episodes if you want to travel into the past. Just read the latest Congressional Budget Office “research” claiming that Obama’s so-called stimulus “increased the number of full-time-equivalent jobs by 1.8 million to 4.1 million.”…
How Unions Screw Poor People Out of Jobs
Ever wonder why unions care so much about the minimum wage when almost all union members get paid above that level? The answer is simply, but sleazy. As Walter Williams explains, they want to protect their high-pay status by increasing the cost of lower-skilled…
Send Mayor Daley to Jamaica…and Without a Gun to Defend Himself
Is there anything more despicable than a politician with personal (taxpayer-financed!) security guards who wants to prevent other people from having the right of self defense? Mayor Daley of Chicago is a good example of this strange species (scientific name:…
Too Little and Too Late for Europe, Part II
When even the New York Times is writing articles about the collapse of the European welfare state, you know that the political establishment is finally recognizing the writing on the wall. Recognizing a problem and solving a problem, however, are two different things….
The United States of Greece
Americans should not get too smug about the troubles in Europe because the Bush-Obama policies of wasteful spending are bringing us down the same path. The latest evidence comes from a well-researched article about personal income in USA Today showing that the share…
Too Little and Too Late for Europe, Part I
Governments that tax work and subsidize sloth are committing a form of slow-motion suicide, and the Greek fiscal crisis is the canary in the coal mine of this phenomenon. Interestingly, some European governments are trying to halt the downward slide, though I suspect…