Peggy Noonan makes a compelling case in the Wall Street Journal that the Tea Party has rescued the GOP by allowing Republicans to escape the statist legacy of George W. Bush and forcing them to re-focus on the need to restrain big government. I’m not sure that she’s right. After all, the establishment wing of […]

I want to believe. No, I’m not talking about the X-Files movie from 2008. I’m referring to the BBC’s report that the U.K. government will cut spending and eliminate 500,000 government positions. Unfortunately, I can’t accept this story at face value. As I’ve noted before, the United Kingdom has the same dishonest fiscal system we […]

Governor Mitch Daniels of Indiana has triggered a spat among policy wonks with his recent comments expressing sympathy for a value-added tax (VAT). Kevin Williamson of National Review is arguing that a VAT will probably be necessary because there is no hope of restraining spending. Ryan Ellis of Americans for Tax Reform jumped on Williamson for his “apostasy,” arguing that a VAT would be bad news for taxpayers. From a policy perspective, I’m very much against a VAT because it will finance bigger government, as explained in this video.

Time for some much-needed positive news. Ordinary taxpayers are slowly but surely figuring out that federal workers are overpaid and underworked. Here are some of the details from the story in the Washington Post. More than half of Americans say they think that federal workers are overpaid for the work they do…according to a Washington Post poll. […]

Tim Carney of the Washington Examiner is an expert on corruption and sleaze inside the beltway, and his column this morning is a perfect example. He shows how corrupt insiders in Alaska use something known as the “Rent-an-Eskimo” scam to pull in hundreds of millions of tax dollars from no-bid federal contracts. These insiders, meanwhile, […]

I’m mystified that some conservatives and libertarians are sympathetic to the idea that Mitch Daniels, the governor of Indiana, might be a good candidate in 2012. The main challenge for our nation is the growing burden of government, so it seems that this would disqualify anybody who served as Budget Director for President George W. […]

For the umpteenth time, a Washington Post columnist has a turgid piece urging the Republican Party to embrace big government. Normally this type of column is written by a graybeard establishmentarian like David Broder or E.J. Dionne, but Ruth Marcus has decided to play the I-wonder-if-my-enemies-are-so-stupid-that-they’ll-accept-my-suggestion-to-commit-suicide game. Marcus bases her argument on the fact that David […]

There certainly are logical reasons to think that Obama’s policies are dampening economic growth. Investors and entrepreneurs have little reason to produce and take risks, after all, when they know the burden of government is going to climb. Especially when you add uncertainty to the mix. Here’s a chart showing Federal Reserve data on the […]

There’s an encouraging new poll from Gallup which reveals that 72 percent of Americans say something negative when asked for a one-word description of the federal government. Here’s the “word cloud” showing the results. As you can see, this is very similar to the results for a similar poll on how people describe Congress. Not […]

The Economist has a fascinating webpage that allows you to look at all the world’s nations and compare them based on various measures of government debt (and for various years). The most economically relevant measure is public debt as a share of GDP, and you can see that the United States is not in great […]