Kevin Williamson has a long-overdue piece in National Review making two essential points about supply-side economics and the Laffer Curve. First, he explains that tax cuts are not the fiscal equivalent of a perpetual motion machine. Simply stated, too many Republicans…
Daily Analysis
Wall Street Journal Savages Greek Bailout
I always appreciate a column that sounds like I could have been the author, and this editorial from the WSJ hits the mark. The IMF/EU bailout is just masking the problems of a bloated welfare state and giving politicians some breathing room to avoid making the real…
Greece’s Problem Is High Tax Rates, not Tax Evasion
The New York Times has an article describing widespread tax evasion in Greece, along with an implication that the country’s fiscal crisis is largely the result of unpaid taxes and could be mostly solved if taxpayers were more obedient to the state. This is an…
Is Obama Turning America into a Banana Republic?
I meant to write about this article when it first came out, but it got buried in my inbox. That being said, this Washington Times column by Richard Rahn makes an excellent point about the dangers of too much government. He points out that Argentina used to one of the…
Super-Charging the IRS with Government-Run Healthcare
I blogged a cartoon joking about Obamacare as a Trojan Horse for the IRS, but with each passing day we are learning new – and always unpleasant – details about the mammoth legislation that was imposed by the left. The excerpt below from the Boston Globe…
Greek Chutzpah
There’s an old joke that if you owe a bank $10,000, you have a problem, but if you owe a bank $10,000,000, the bank has a problem. The Greek government certainly seems to have that attitude. Short-sighted and corrupt politicians in Athens have spent their nation…
American and German Taxpayers Should Be Rioting, not Greek Moochers
My blood pressure spiked after reading this story from the UK-based Times. The Greeks are rioting in the streets because they want our money (i.e., an IMF bailout) and they want to keep all the inefficient and wasteful government policies that caused the crisis. In…
Obama's Hypocritical Class Warfare
The President had another “spread the wealth” slip of the tongue the other day, this time remarking that “at some point you have made enough money.” Some have commented that this exposes Obama’s anti-capitalist ideology, and others have…
Ny Trip to Spain
GreeI arrived in Madrid last week for a speech to the annual Convention of Independent Financial Advisors, and it is somehow fitting that Spain was downgraded by Standard and Poor’s as I entered the country. I’m not a fan of the bond-rating agencies, and…
Excellent Primer on the Financial Crisis
Russ Roberts of George Mason University has written a very good article for the Mercatus Center explaining – for economists and non-economists – how government intervention created distortions in the housing and finance sectors. He also blames Wall Street,…