I’ve beaten up on Newt Gingrich for his views on global warming and his attack on the Ryan budget plan, but I’m completely on his side in the faux controversy about whether it is racist to call Barack Obama the “food stamp president.” This story from ABC News should worry everybody, regardless of whether the […]

The Economist magazine has a couple of good articles about Australia’s increasingly enviable economic status. Here’s a blurb from the first article, which outlines the pro-market reforms that enabled today’s prosperity. Only a dozen economies are bigger, and only six nations are richer—of which Switzerland alone has even a third as many people. Australia is […]

One of the biggest threats against global prosperity is the anti-tax competition project of a Paris-based international bureaucracy known as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The OECD, acting at the behest of the European welfare states that dominate its membership, wants the power to tell nations (including the United States!) what is acceptable […]

Last night, I spoke at the closing dinner of the European Resource Bank. My message was simple and straightforward: Entitlement programs are killing the developed world. That’s not exactly a surprise, but what may be shocking is America’s relative position. In my remarks, I shared with the audience some data from a 2010 study by […]

There’s a lot of buzz about a Wall Street Journal interview with Stanley Druckenmiller, in which he argues that a temporary delay in making payments on U.S. government debt (which technically would be a default) would be a small price to pay if it resulted in the long-term spending reforms that are needed to save […]

I recently took part in a symposium on “The Budget Deficit and U.S. Competitiveness.” Put together by the Council on Foreign Relations, five of us were asked to concisely explain our thoughts on the issue. Here’s some of what I wrote: Excessive government spending can slow growth by diverting labor and capital from more productive […]

The Labor Department released its latest job numbers today and they remind me of Clint Eastwood’s 1966 classic, “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.” The good news is that the economy created 244,000 new jobs, the biggest gain in almost one year. And the jobs were in the productive sector of the economy rather […]

As I have explained elsewhere, tax increases are a bad idea – unless you favor bigger government. And I’ve already added my two cents to the tax debate between Senator Coburn and Grover Norquist regarding the desirability of higher taxes. So it won’t surprise anyone to know that I fully agree with this new video […]

I just read something that unleashed my inner teenager, because I want to respond with a combination of OMG, LMAO, and WTF. Donald Berwick, the person appointed by Obama to be in charge of Medicare, has a column in the Wall Street Journal that makes a very good observation about how relative prices are falling […]