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…
Daily Analysis
Bush's Minimum Wage Increase Killed Jobs.
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….
Lessons from the Greek Budget Debacle.
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…
Senator Bunning Exposes Washington's Fiscal Frauds.
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…
Politicians Are the Enemy, not Rich People.
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…
Mark Steyn on Greece.
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…
Yes, Simon, People in the United Kingdom Die Because of Government-Run Healthcare.
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…
Crazy Brit Bureaucrats Want "Competency Tests" for Dog Owners.
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…
The Fox Butterfield Effect and the Laffer Curve.
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…
Europe Lags Behind.
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…