First, some good news. The United States is in much better shape than most other developed nations, particularly if you look at broad measures of prosperity and living standards. And our economy is growing and the private sector is creating jobs. That’s the glass-half-full way of looking at things. But if you’re a glass-half-empty person, […]

Fighting against statism in Washington is a lot like trying to swim upstream. It seems that everything (how to measure spending cuts, how to estimate tax revenue, etc) is rigged to make your job harder. A timely example is the way the way government puts together data on economic output and the way the media […]

Much to the horror of various interest groups, it appears that there will be a “sequester” on March 1. This means an automatic reduction in spending authority for selected programs (interest payments are exempt, as are most entitlement outlays). Just about everybody in Washington is frantic about the sequester, which supposedly will mean “savage” and […]

A reader sent an email to ask “Which federal department should be abolished first?” I guess this is what is meant when people talk about a target-rich environment. We have an abundance of candidates, including the Department of Education, Department of Agriculture, Department of Energy, Department of Commerce, Department of Transportation, etc. But if I […]

Good fiscal policy doesn’t require heavy lifting. Governments simply need to limit the burden of government spending. The key variable is making sure spending doesn’t consume ever-larger shares of economic output. In other words, follow Mitchell’s Golden Rule. It’s possible for a nation to have a large public sector and be fiscally stable. Growth won’t […]