Daily Analysis

Jousting on MSNBC (with a libertarian host?)

This MSNBC interview was halfway through before I got a chance to talk, so I was beginning to think I was a victim of bias, but then the host mentioned Greece degenerating like a scene out of Atlas Shrugged. I’m not sure what to think, but I did get in some good shots…

The Deadly Impact of the Death Tax

Australia got rid of its death tax in 1979. A couple of Aussie academics investigated whether the elimination of the tax had any impact on death rates. They found the ultimate example of supply-side economics, as reported in the abstract of their study. In 1979,…

Will America Be a Fiscal Failure?

Investor’s Business Daily has an excellent editorial on fiscal policy, and not just because they quote me. They understand that America’s fiscal problem is spending rather than deficits. They also realize that tax increases are completely misguided since the economy…

Did the Bush Tax Cuts Cause Today’s Deficits?

My former colleague at the Heritage Foundation, Brian Riedl, has a column in the Wall Street Journal today which discusses the degree to which President Bush’s policies can be blamed for current deficits. I think Brian is too easy on Bush’s terrible record as a big…

Obama Is Repeating Roosevelt’s Other Mistakes

Much of the economic debate in Washington revolves around the silly Keynesian notion that politicians can stimulate an economy by borrowing money from the private sector and using the funds to make government bigger. That didn’t work for Hoover and Roosevelt during…

Obama Is Greedy, not Racist

The Washington Post has a story, excerpted below, about people who think the tanning tax is racist because it targets a service used overwhelmingly by white people. And while some critics make a good point about how that would be the story if there was a tax on a…

Bashing Bush-Obama Statism on CNBC

In a debate with one of the hopeless ideologues from the Center for American Progress, I criticize the corrupt deals between big government and big business, I warn about the big tax increases scheduled to take effect next year, I explain that Republicans did Obama a…