Back in 2010, I crunched the numbers from the Congressional Budget Office and reported that the budget could be balanced in just 10 years if politicians exercised a modicum of fiscal discipline and limited annual spending increases to about 2 percent yearly. When CBO issued new numbers early last year, I repeated the exercise and […]

As I explained in this set of videos, we desperately need to reform entitlement programs. But not in the wrong way, with price fixing and means testing. Good reform means personal retirement accounts for Social Security. It means vouchers for Medicare. And it means block-granting Medicaid back to the states. And if you want to understand why reform […]

Paul Krugman has told us that awful stories about government-run healthcare in Britain “are false.” I guess this means that the media must be dominated by conservative liars, since we keep getting reports about substandard care and needless deaths (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here). And the Boston Globe and Associated Press must be part of this vast […]

I have a new article for National Review about the fallout from the Supercommittee. Among the points I make are: o We were lucky to dodge a tax hike. o There’s still a threat of a tax hike if big-government Republicans side with the so-called rational left in favor of a tax-increase proposal, such as […]

Most people have a vague understanding that America has a huge long-run fiscal problem. They’re right, though they probably don’t realize the seriousness of that looming crisis. Here’s what you need to know: America’s fiscal crisis is actually a spending crisis, and that spending crisis is driven by entitlements. More specifically, the vast majority of […]

I’ve written about the fiscal implosion in Europe and warned that America faces the same fate if we don’t reform poorly designed entitlement programs such as Medicare and Medicaid. But this new video from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity, narrated by an Italian student and former Cato Institute intern, may be the best explanation […]

Even though the unwashed masses decided that I didn’t win my stimulus debate in New York City, I continue my fight for the hearts and minds of the American people. I’m now taking part in a debate for U.S. News & World Report on “Who Is Handling Its Debt Crisis Better: United States or Europe?” […]

The United Kingdom has one of the most statist healthcare systems in the world. Indeed, my Cato colleague Mike Tanner produced an excellent study showing that the U.K. system is  more rigid and centralized than what is found even in nations such as Germany and France. Not surprisingly, this has generated terrible results for the […]