I feel like a pendulum this election season. Something will happen that makes me want to eviscerate Obama’s statist policies and I’ll write a foaming-at-the-mouth post warning that the President is turning America into Greece. But then Romney will do something odious and I’ll sound the warning sign with a we-don’t-need-another-big-spender-like-Bush post. Today, it’s Obama’s […]

The mess in Europe has been rather frustrating, largely because almost everybody is on the wrong side. Some folks say they want “austerity,” but that’s largely a code word for higher taxes. They’re fighting against the people who say they want “growth,” but that’s generally a code word for more Keynesian spending. So you can […]

With all the fiscal troubles in Greece, Spain, Ireland, Portugal, and Italy, there’s not much attention being paid to Cyprus. But the Mediterranean island nation is a good case study illustrating the economic dangers of big government. For all intents and purposes, Cyprus is now bankrupt, and the only question that remains to be answered […]

Spain’s received a bailout, Greece is having another election tomorrow, and the European political elite is pushing for more centralization. In other words, business as usual in the continent where voters think you can get nothing for nothing (this satirical cartoon is now European reality) and politicians think every problem can be solved by more […]

Writing in yesterday’s Washington Post, former Obama economist Larry Summers put forth the strange hypothesis that more red ink would improve the federal government’s long-run fiscal position. This sounds like an excuse for more Keynesian spending as part of another so-called stimulus plan, but Summers claims to have a much more modest goal of prudent […]

I’ve complained endlessly that America’s fiscal problem is too much spending, and that deficits and debt are best understood as symptoms of that underlying disease. So I’m obviously a big fan of this new video from the folks at Learn Liberty. I like how they use several types of measurements to show that there’s plenty […]

I’ve argued, ad nauseam, that the single most important goal of fiscal policy is (or should be) to make sure the private sector grows faster than the government. This “golden rule” is the best way of enabling growth and avoiding fiscal crises, and I’ve cited nations that have made progress by restraining government spending. But […]

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 […]