The Laffer Curve is one of my favorite issues (see here, here, here, here, here, etc). But it is a very frustrating topic. Half my time is spent trying to convince left-leaning people that the Laffer Curve exists. I use common-sense explanations. I cite historical examples. I even use information from left-of-center institutions in hopes […]

The mid-term elections were a rejection of President Obama’s big-government agenda, but those results don’t necessarily mean better policy. We should not forget, after all, that Democrats rammed through Obamacare even after losing the special election to replace Ted Kennedy in Massachusetts.

Similarly, GOP control of the House of Representatives does not automatically mean less government and more freedom. Here are five possible bad policies for 2011, most of which the Obama White House can implement by using executive power.

This doesn’t have the production quality of the Hayek-Keynes rap video, and it presumably won’t get as many views, but this young lady has a very clever love song for Friedrich Hayek.

I don’t now why I bothered spending all that time perusing the writings of Paul Krugman and Larry Summers in order to produce my previous blog post when this Michael Ramirez cartoon makes the same point in a much simpler way.

The two main political parties are sniping at each other about the just-concluded tax deal, largely because Republicans are happy and Democrats are displeased that all of the 2001/2003 tax cuts are being extended for all taxpayers. Almost nobody is paying attention to the new spending that is in the agreement, however, most notably the […]

The title of this post may be a slight exaggeration. I actually recommend you read the entire two-page paper by Devon Herrick of the National Center for Policy Analysis. But this chart from that study is an excellent visual display of what’s wrong with the health care system. You can see that the price of […]

Thanks to the folks at the Mises Institute, Professor George Selgin of the University of Georgia (!) has a superb presentation on the failings of the Federal Reserve. George was one of my professors at George Mason University back in the 1980s and is one of the world’s experts on competing currencies. This video is […]

I’m understandably fond of my video exposing the flaws of Keynesian stimulus theory, but I think my former intern has a great contribution to the debate with this new 5-minute mini-documentary. You may recognize Hiwa. She narrated a very popular video earlier this year on the nightmare of income-tax complexity.

Ireland is in deep fiscal trouble and the Germans and the French apparently want the politicians in Dublin to increase the nation’s 12.5 percent corporate tax rate as the price for being bailed out. This is almost certainly the cause of considerable smugness and joy in Europe’s high-tax nations, many of which have been very resentful of Ireland for enjoying so much prosperity in recent decades in part because of a low corporate tax burden.

But is there any reason to think Ireland’s competitive corporate tax regime is responsible for the nation’s economic crisis? The answer, not surprisingly, is no.

I’ve already written about the terrible work of the Congressional Budget Office. The CBO did an awful job on the stimulus, for instance, repeatedly asserting that diverting money from the private sector to government somehow would create jobs. CBO also was a disaster on Obamacare, claiming that a giant new entitlement program would reduce budget […]