When I first read this story in the Washington Post about supposedly under-appreciated federal bureaucrats, I was tempted to focus on the sentence referring to “the sledgehammer of budget cuts scheduled to hit today.” Is the Washington Post so biased and/or clueless that reporters really think that a 1.2 percent reduction in overall spending for […]

Texas is in much better shape than California. Taxes are lower, in part because Texas has no state income tax. No wonder the Lone Star State is growing faster and creating more jobs. And the gap will soon get even wider since California voters recently decided to drive away more productive people by raising top […]

In large part because of an excessive burden of government, the American economy is suffering European-style stagnation, with even the Washington Post now confessing that growth far below the long-run trend. This helps explain why job creation has been so dismal in recent years, with more than twenty million Americans out of work, underemployed, or […]

The Cato Institute’s Chris Edwards put together a remarkable (and depressing) chart showing that federal bureaucrats get almost twice the level of compensation as workers in the productive sector of the economy. Defenders of the bureaucracy (including a federal pay panel dominated by bureaucrats) claim that government employees actually are underpaid because…well…just because. My modest […]

Hopefully we’re all disgusted when insiders rig the system to rip off taxpayers. And I suspect you’re not surprised to know that the worst examples come from California, which is in a race with Illinois to see which state can become the Greece of America. Well, the Golden State has a new über-bureaucrat. Here are […]

I’ve written before about the heavy costs of regulation, including these rather sobering statistics. Or, to be more accurate, here are some staggering numbers. Americans spend 8.8 billion hours every year filling out government forms. The economy-wide cost of regulation is now $1.75 trillion. For every bureaucrat at a regulatory agency, 100 jobs are destroyed […]

Since I’ve been in Washington from more than 25 years, it takes something really remarkable to shock me. But when I read today that federal bureaucrats are supposedly underpaid, notwithstanding all the evidence to the contrary, I thought somebody had sent me an article from the Onion. But then I saw that the assertion of […]

Like Sweden and Denmark, Germany is a semi-rational welfare state. It generally relies on a market-oriented approach in areas other than fiscal policy, and it avoided the Keynesian excesses that caused additional misery and red ink in America (though it is far from fiscally conservative, notwithstanding the sophomoric analysis of the Washington Post). Nonetheless, it’s […]

What Do Greece, the United States, and the Cayman Islands Have in Common? At first, this seems like a trick question. After all, the Cayman Islands are a fiscal paradise, with no personal income tax, no corporate income tax, no capital gains tax, and no death tax. By contrast, Greece is a bankrupt, high-tax welfare […]

President Obama recently got himself in a bit of hot water with his “you didn’t build that” remark, which trivialized the hard work of entrepreneurs. But he is right – in a perverse way – about government playing a big role in the life of small businesses. Thanks to a maze of regulations, the government […]