Obama has repeated once again that he will throw the nation off the fiscal cliff if Republicans don’t capitulate to his demands for class-warfare tax hikes. This is a serious topic worthy of weighty analysis, but I don’t really have anything to add to what I’ve written before – particularly with regard to the threat […]

I periodically mock the crazy statists of California. The state is almost surely doomed to suffer a Greek-style fiscal chaos. The only unknown is whether Illinois will beat the Golden State into default. The politicians in Sacramento impose very high taxes to fund a bloated bureaucracy that oversees a bunch of politically correct nonsense. But […]

I try to be self aware, so I realize that I have the fiscal version of Tourette’s. Regardless of the question that is asked, I’m tempted to blurt out that the answer is to reduce the burden of government spending. But sometimes that’s exactly the right prescription, particularly for an economy weighed down by a […]

One of the principles of good tax policy and fundamental tax reform is that there should be no double taxation of income that is saved and invested. Such a policy promotes current consumption at the expense of future consumption, which is simply an econo-geek way of saying that it penalizes capital formation. This isn’t very […]

Even though I have remarked on many occasions that the burden of government was reduced during the Clinton years, that doesn’t mean Bill Clinton was in favor of smaller government. And it definitely doesn’t mean that his appointees believed in economic liberty. Consider the case of Laura Tyson, who served as Chair of Clinton’s Council […]

Ayn Rand’s famous novel, Atlas Shrugged, tells the story of what happens when society’s most productive people go on strike because they don’t want to subsidize the looters and moochers. I won’t give away the plot, but one interesting twist in the story is when government officials realize that they need some people to produce. […]

If you live in America and believe in free markets and small government, it’s easy to get depressed. We suffered through eight years of wasteful spending and misguided intervention under Bush, and now we’re enduring four years of additional spending and red tape under Obama. Moreover, it’s not clear things will get any better in […]