I wrote about the Ryan budget two days ago, praising it for complying with Mitchell’s Golden Rule and reforming Medicare and Medicaid. But I believe in being honest and nonpartisan, so I also groused that it wasn’t as good as the 2011 and 2012 versions. Now it’s time to give the same neutral and dispassionate […]

Sigh. Even when they’re sort of doing the right thing, Republicans are incapable of using the right argument. Paul Ryan, Chairman of the House Budget Committee, has unveiled his proposed budget and he and other Republicans are bragging that the plan will balance the budget in 10 years. That’s all fine and well, but good […]

I’m a proponent of a pro-growth and non-corrupt tax code. I mostly write and talk about the flat tax, though I’d be happy to instead accept a national sales tax if we could somehow get rid of the 16th Amendment and replace it with something so ironclad that even Justices such as John Roberts and […]

When speaking about the difference between the private sector and the government, I sometimes emphasize that mistakes and errors are inevitable, and that the propensity to screw up may be just as prevalent in the private sector as it is in the public sector. I actually think the government is more likely to screw up, for […]

First, some good news. The United States is in much better shape than most other developed nations, particularly if you look at broad measures of prosperity and living standards. And our economy is growing and the private sector is creating jobs. That’s the glass-half-full way of looking at things. But if you’re a glass-half-empty person, […]

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 […]

Daniel Hannan is a member of the European Parliament from England. He is one of the few economically sensible people in that body, as demonstrated in these short clips of him speaking about tax competition and deriding the European Commission’s corrupt racket. And as you can see from his latest article in the UK-based Telegraph, […]

Fighting against statism in Washington is a lot like trying to swim upstream. It seems that everything (how to measure spending cuts, how to estimate tax revenue, etc) is rigged to make your job harder. A timely example is the way the way government puts together data on economic output and the way the media […]

Back in 2010, I shared a remarkable graph comparing the predictions of economists to what actually happened. Not surprisingly, the two lines don’t exactly overlap, which explains the old joke that economists have correctly predicted nine of the last five recessions. It’s not that economists are totally useless. It’s just that they don’t do a […]

If you don’t want to be depressed, you should stop reading right now. You probably know that we’ve been suffering because of a rising burden of government spending. And you probably understand that much of the problem is the relentless growth of redistribution and transfer programs. But you probably don’t realize how far America has […]