If you want to know why Washington is a cesspool of corruption and graft, you should read this story from the Washington Post about how Capitol Hill staffers use their positions as stepping stones to jobs in the lobbying community. Nearly 5,400 former congressional staffers have left Capitol Hill to become federal lobbyists in the […]

This is either frightening or hilarious. The people in Washington who are trying to make America more like Europe are advising the Europeans to double-down on the awful policies that have pushed the continent’s welfare states to insolvency. Here are some of the surreal details from a CNBC report. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner will take […]

The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities is a left-wing group in Washington that advocates for bigger government and higher taxes. In an effort to promote more redistribution, they recently put together a map showing how welfare benefits varied by state. We’re supposed to look at the map and conclude that welfare benefits are too […]

The President’s “green energy” loan program has turned into an embarrassment for the White House, in part because of the sordid corruption associated with the bankruptcy of Solyndra. But the subsidy program also has attracted some negative attention for its failure to create jobs – even from media outlets that normally are sympathetic to big […]

Sometimes during speeches, when explaining why politicians shouldn’t double tax income that is saved and invested, I ask the audience whether it would make sense to harvest apples by cutting the branches off of trees filled with ripe fruit. In every audience (at least when I’m not talking to politicians), people instinctively understand that this […]

I don’t have strong feelings about Sarah Palin, but I like her anti-establishment attitude. And, in a case of strange bedfellows, so does the New York Times. Or at least one columnist is honest enough to admit when she makes a compelling argument. Here’s an excerpt from a column published yesterday, in which the author […]

President Obama will be unveiling another “jobs plan” tomorrow night, though Democrats are being careful not to call it stimulus after the failure of the $800 billion package from 2008. But just as a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, bigger government is not good for the economy, regardless of how it […]

I’m normally disappointed when religious figures comment on economics, particularly since they often turn the individual call to charity into a blank check for government-coerced redistribution. This runs contrary to individual choice, free will, and morality. So I’m delighted that Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, writing for  L’Osservatore Romano, the quasi-official newspaper of the Vatican,  persuasively explains […]

I wrote last year that, “I don’t think public policy should be based on polling data, but I always am happy when the American people are on the right side of an issue since it increases the possibility of good outcomes in Washington.” One other thing to consider is that pollsters can manipulate results by […]