I’ve frequently commented on Europe’s fiscal mess and argued that excessive government spending is responsible for both the sovereign debt crisis and the economic stagnation that plagues the continent. But it does seem that things have calmed down, so the readers who have submitted questions about whether the fiscal crisis has ended obviously are paying […]

Back in mid-2010, I wrote that Portugal was going to exacerbate its fiscal problems by raising taxes. Needless to say, I was right. Not that this required any special insight. After all, no nation has ever taxed its way to prosperity. We’re now at the end of 2012 and Portugal is still saddled with a […]

There aren’t many fiscal policy role models in Europe. Switzerland surely is at the top of the list. The burden of government spending is modest by European standards, in part because of a very good spending cap that prevents politicians from overspending when revenues are buoyant. Tax rates also are reasonable. The central government’s tax […]

Washington frustrates me. The entire town is based on legalized corruption as an unworthy elite figure out new ways of accumulating unearned wealth by skimming money from the nation’s producers. But one thing that especially irks me is the way people focus on the trees and forget about the forest. Politicians and journalists are now […]

I’ve shared BIS and OECD data showing that the United States has a bigger long-run fiscal burden than Europe. That’s a bit of a strained comparison since “Europe” includes fiscally responsible countries such as Switzerland and Estonia, but also soon-to-be failed states such as Greece and France. But the one common theme, as I explain in […]

I’m not talking about secession in the United States, where the issue is linked to the ugliness of slavery (though at least Walter Williams can write about the issue without the risk of being accused of closet racism). But what about Europe? I have a hard time understanding why nations on the other side of […]

Very few people are willing to admit that they favor protectionism. After all, who wants to embrace a policy associated with the Great Depression? But people sometimes say “I want free trade so long as it’s fair trade.” In most cases, they’re simply protectionists who are too clever to admit their true agenda There’s a […]

Like Sweden and Denmark, Germany is a semi-rational welfare state. It generally relies on a market-oriented approach in areas other than fiscal policy, and it avoided the Keynesian excesses that caused additional misery and red ink in America (though it is far from fiscally conservative, notwithstanding the sophomoric analysis of the Washington Post). Nonetheless, it’s […]

Back in 2010, I posted a fascinating map from the Economist website, showing debt burdens (as a share of GDP) for nations around the world. This data showed lots of red ink, with Western Europe generally being more indebted than the United States. In 2011, I posted some charts from a study by the Bank […]

Every so often, you read something so ridiculously stupid and absurd that you assume that you’re being pranked. So you look to the date of the article to see if it says April 1. Or you look at the Internet address to see if it’s a parody of a real website. So when I read […]