I’m not a big fan of Obamanomics. I don’t like the President’s class-warfare mentality on taxes. I don’t like his support for Keynesian spending policy. And I don’t like his costly expansions of government such as Obamacare. Indeed, I even like mocking his reflexive statism. That being said, I fully agree (albeit with some important caveats) with his observation that the United States […]

You’re probably surprised by the title of this post. You may even be wondering if President Obama had an epiphany on the road to Greece? I don’t mean to burst your bubble, but the leader we’re talking about isn’t the President of the United States. Instead, we’re talking about the Prime Minister of Finland and he deserves […]

My colleagues Chris Edwards and Nicole Kaeding have just released the biannual Fiscal Policy Report Card on America’s Governors from the Cato Institute. The Report Card is on the Cato Institute’s most impressive publications sincedevelopments on the state level help illustrate the relationship between good fiscal policy and economic performance. The top scores were earned by Pat McCrory […]

I’ve shared some interested rankings on tax policy, including a map from the Tax Foundation showing which states have the earliest and latest Tax Freedom Days. There’s also a depressing table showing that the United States “earns” a lowly 94th place in a ranking of business-friendly tax system. Heck, there’s even a map showing the states with the highest wine taxes, […]

We know the welfare state is good news for people inside government. Lots of bureaucrats are required, after all, to oversee a plethora of redistribution programs. Walter Williams refers to these paper pushers as poverty pimps, and there’s even a ranking showing which states have the greatest number of these folks who profit by creating dependency. But […]

America’s health care system is a mess, and we can assign almost all the blame on government. Simply stated, we don’t have functioning and efficient markets because Medicaid, Medicare, tax-code distortions, and other forms of regulation and intervention have created a system that is crippled by a third-party payer crisis. There’s no logical reason to expect consumers to […]

Why is President Obama so fixated on a class-warfare agenda of higher taxes on the rich and government dependency for the poor? Is it because a tax-the-rich agenda is good politics, as determined by clever pollsters who have tapped into the collective mind of American voters (and as demonstrated by this cartoon)? Or is the President ideologically committed to […]

When asked about the most worrisome statistic for a nation, I don’t say it’s the top marginal tax rate, even though I think class-warfare taxation is very poisonous for long-run economic performance. Nor do I say it’s the burden of government spending relative to private economic output, even though the size of the public sector gives us a good idea of the degree […]