With the public unconvinced of the wisdom of soaking the rich, the latest hot idea floating around in statist circles is not to soak the rich, but rather the really, super-duper, ultra rich. In a class-warfare filled screed, James Surowiecki wrote in the New Yorker on the need to “Soak the Very, Very Rich.” A […]

I seem to have touched a raw nerve with my post earlier today comparing Reagan and Obama on how well the economy performed coming out of recession. Both Ezra Klein and Paul Krugman have denounced my analysis (actually, they denounced me approving of Richard Rahn’s analysis, but that’s a trivial detail). Krugman responded by asserting that […]

Statists view “the rich” as nothing more than ATM machines for funding big-government welfare states. They think they can take as much as they like – they’re rich, after all! – without consequences. Once they empty the machine, the bank comes out and fills it up again. But real people don’t work that way. They […]

In a column in today’s New York Post, I mock White House unemployment calculations and then explain why companies are not anxious to hire more workers. The White House last year released a supposedly scientific analysis that claimed to show that adopting the “stimulus” bill would cut unemployment. Indeed, the report specifically estimated that the […]

The statists in Congress are enamored with Keynesian big government policies and profligate spending as a means of “stimulus.”  But while they travel the country to tout so-called “stimulus success,” the public displays a far better understanding of the underlying economics.  Not only does a plurality find that the stimulus bill actually hurt – rather […]

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of the UK-based Telegraph has a very dismal outlook for the US economy. I’m more optimistic. While I think Obama’s policies will prevent America from enjoying a Reagan-type boom, I don’t think the current Administration is repeating all the mistakes of Hoover and Roosevelt, so I think a depression or double-dip recession is […]

The fault line in American politics is not really between Republicans and Democrats, but rather between taxpayers and the Washington political elite. Here are two examples that symbolize why economic policy is such a mess. First, we have President Bush’s former top aide, Karl Rove, making the case in the Wall Street Journal that the […]

Chris Christie of New Jersey has done a remarkable job so far, but his biggest battles are still ahead of him. A key fight is whether the state will impose a cap on property taxes. As the Wall Street Journal opines, this reform has worked very well in Massachusetts and is critical to curtailiing the […]

Allan Meltzer has an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal explaining the failures of Obamanomics. One of the causes he identifies is the high level of uncertainty surrounding tax rates and regulatory policy under this administration.  Such uncertainty is the enemy of growth.  Robert Higgs first introduced “regime uncertainty” in his 1997 article explaining […]

In his Washington Post column discussing a crisis of confidence among economists, Robert Samuelson correctly notes that Keynesians don’t seem to have the right answers. But he concludes that other schools of thought are similarly befuddled by current events. What he writes is not terribly objectionable, but it’s almost as if he thinks the fiscal debate in the […]