For their tax reform plans to work, candidates need concomitant proposals to restrain the growth of federal spending.

“The Donald” finally unveils a real plan.

An active Washington brings the lobbyists out of hiding.

The establishment fervently believes that more money should come to Washington so that politicians have greater ability to buy votes. That’s why statists from both parties are so viscerally hostile to Grover Norquist’s no-tax-hike pledge. They view it as an obstacle to bigger government. And it also explains why politicians who raise taxes are showered with praise, especially […]

I got involved in a bit of a controversy last year about presidential profligacy. Some guy named Rex Nutting put together some data on government spending and claimed that Barack Obama was the most frugal President in recent history. I pointed out that Mr. Nutting’s data left something to be desired because he didn’t adjust […]

I almost feel sorry for the Obama Administration’s spin doctors. Every month, they probably wait for the unemployment numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics with the same level of excitement that people on death row wait for their execution date. This has been going on for a while and today’s new data is another […]

People in the political world say that President Obama threw Secretary of State Clinton under the bus in an attempt to protect himself from political fallout from Libya. I don’t follow those issues, so I can’t comment about the veracity of that charge, but I find it very interesting that some conservatives are urging Mitt […]

Wow. I wasn’t surprised to learn that the United States dropped in the new rankings unveiled today in Economic Freedom of the World. But I’m somewhat shocked to learn that we fell from 10th last year all the way down to 18th this year, as can be seen on the chart (click to enlarge). Last […]

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 […]

A couple of weeks ago, I debunked the myth that Obama is a fiscal conservative by showing how TARP masks his real record. I then followed up that post by showing that Obama is a traditional leftist who spends on social welfare programs, but also did a final post showing that Bush was similarly profligate. Now we […]