Every so often, you read something so ridiculously stupid and absurd that you assume that you’re being pranked. So you look to the date of the article to see if it says April 1. Or you look at the Internet address to see if it’s a parody of a real website. So when I read […]

Even though I’ve already made clear that I am less-than-overwhelmed by the thought of Mitt Romney in the White House, I worry that people will become to think I’m a GOP toady. That’s because I’ve been spending a lot of time providing favorable analysis and commentary on the relative merits of the Ryan budget (particularly proposed […]

The burden of federal spending in the United States was down to 18.2 percent of gross domestic product when Bill Clinton left office. But this progress didn’t last long. Thanks to George Bush’s reckless spending policies, the federal budget grew about twice as fast as the economy, jumping by nearly 90 percent in just eight […]

For years, I’ve been warning that a value-added tax (VAT) would be a terrible idea. Simply stated, politicians would have no reason to control spending or reform entitlements if they had a new source of tax revenue. In this video, I explain why this European-style national sales tax is a money machine for bigger government. […]

While I disagree with statists, I sometimes admire their discipline. They are very good at staying “on message.” I am 100 percent confident, for instance, that they intend big tax hikes on the middle class, even though they would piously swear an oath to the contrary. Indeed, I suspect more than 90 percent of them […]

I like sequestration. Automatic budget cuts might not be the best way of reducing the burden of government spending, but a sequester is better than leaving the federal budget on autopilot. Particularly since the “cuts” are mostly just reductions in already-scheduled increases. The only exception, at least in the short run, is the defense budget. […]

I almost feel sorry for the ideologues and partisan hacks who feel obliged to defends Obama’s miserable economic performance. Keynesian spending policies and class-warfare tax policies have produced dismal economic performance, with unemployment stuck above 8 percent – even though the White House promised the joblessness rate by this point would be about 5.5 percent […]

The mess in Europe has been rather frustrating, largely because almost everybody is on the wrong side. Some folks say they want “austerity,” but that’s largely a code word for higher taxes. They’re fighting against the people who say they want “growth,” but that’s generally a code word for more Keynesian spending. So you can […]