I’ve reported some horror stories about bureaucrats ripping off taxpayers with lavish compensation packages, including: The chief bureaucrat of a low-income California city getting almost $800,000 per year. Cops in Oakland getting average compensation of $188,000. A Philadelphia bureaucrat, after working only 2-1/2 years, nailing down a guaranteed pension of $50,000 per year. A New […]
read more...Last year, I shared a very amusing Michael Ramirez cartoon showing Obama as the European lemming. Now, Mark Helprin takes a much more serious look at the same issue in the Wall Street Journal, commenting on the wisdom (or lack thereof) of Obama’s interest in the European economic model. Both in his re-election campaign and […]
read more...Being pro-market is not the same as being pro-business. A free market means that nobody is using the coercive power of government to obtain unearned goodies, and that is true for big business as well as big labor, or any particular segment of the population. Indeed, handouts to big business are the worst form of […]
read more...In a recent post comparing Reaganomics and Obamanomics, I explained why I think Barack Obama’s policies have been hurting the economy. In today’s New York Post, I do a full-scale indictment. Here are my bullet points. * The unemployment rate is still above 8 percent, even though the White House promised it would drop to […]
read more...n previous posts, I’ve used data from the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank to show how Obamanomics is leading to very weak results, particularly compared to the economic boom triggered by Reaganomics. So you can imagine how I was anxious to participate when U.S. News & World Report asked me to contribute my two cents to […]
read more...Last year, while lounging on the beach in the Caribbean…oops, I mean while doing off-site research, I developed the first iteration of a rule to describe how fiscal policy should operate. Good fiscal policy exists when the private sector grows faster than the public sector, while fiscal ruin is inevitable if government spending grows faster […]
read more...As a libertarian who became interested in public policy because of Ronald Reagan, it won’t surprise you to know that I’m more of a “right libertarian” than “left libertarian.” I fully agree with positions that motivate left libertarians, such as the war on drugs doing more harm than good, foreign entanglements such as NATO no […]
read more...Almost exactly one year ago, I did a post entitled “A Laffer Curve Tutorial” because I wanted readers to have all the arguments and data in one place (and also because it meant I wouldn’t have to track down all the videos when someone asked me for the full set). Today, I’m doing the same […]
read more...While I’m obviously not a fan of big government, I have mixed feelings about why the public sector is so blindly wasteful. Is it because politicians and bureaucrats are well-intentioned morons who accidentally do damage (as illustrated by this cartoon), or is it that they are venal vultures looking to grab as much loot as […]
read more...President Obama’s budget proposal was unveiled today, generating all sorts of conflicting statements from both parties. Some of the assertions wrongly focus on red ink rather than the size of government. Others rely on dishonest Washington budget math, which means spending increases magically become budget cuts simply because outlays are growing at a slower rate […]
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