The fiscal turmoil in Greece is not about fiscal balance. It’s a fight between looters and moochers such as Olga Stefou, who think taxpayers should endlessly subsidize everything, and the shrinking group of productive people who are pulling the wagon and keeping Greece’s economy from total collapse. Not surprisingly, the Greek government has tried to […]

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner may be most famous in the United States for cheating on his taxes (you can even buy a t-shirt to acknowledge his tax dodging), but he’s becoming a punch line in the rest of the world for different reasons. I wrote two years ago about Chinese students erupting in laughter after […]

This is either frightening or hilarious. The people in Washington who are trying to make America more like Europe are advising the Europeans to double-down on the awful policies that have pushed the continent’s welfare states to insolvency. Here are some of the surreal details from a CNBC report. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner will take […]

The editors at Bloomberg have decided that condemning younger workers to a more dismal future is the best way to deal with the Social Security program’s giant long-run shortfall. They want workers to pay higher taxes to prop up the bankrupt system. And, in exchange for those higher taxes, they want to give people less […]

I’m normally disappointed when religious figures comment on economics, particularly since they often turn the individual call to charity into a blank check for government-coerced redistribution. This runs contrary to individual choice, free will, and morality. So I’m delighted that Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, writing for  L’Osservatore Romano, the quasi-official newspaper of the Vatican,  persuasively explains […]

I’ve joked on many occasions that bipartisanship occurs in Washington when the evil party and the stupid party come up with an idea that is simultaneously malicious and misguided. The international version of two-wrongs-don’t-make-a-right occurs whenever the French and the Germans conspire on economic policy. The latest example is a joint proposal for “economic governance” […]

If Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama are neck-and-neck competitors in the contest to be the public face of incompetent statism in America, then the competition in Europe is between Herman van Rompuy and Olga Stefou. But since I’ve already crowned Ms. Stefou as the Queen of Greece, then Mr Rompuy (a.k.a., President of the Euorpean Council) […]

I testified before the House Ways & Means Committee earlier today. As always, my trip inside the belly of the beast was an interesting adventure. The tax-writing committee was holding a hearing on the value-added tax. I was on a panel with five other witnesses, and all of the other people testifying were sympathetic to […]

llister Heath is one of the best economic columnists in Europe and his analysis of Europe’s fiscal situation is rather grim. But Americans can’t be smug. This is where the Bush-Obama policies, combined with demographics, are leading America. Here’s Allister’s analysis of where things stand in Europe. Gold hit £1,000 an ounce today for the […]

President Obama is stubbornly clinging to his ideological agenda of bigger government and class warfare. Wasteful programs magically become “investments” for growth, and higher tax rates get turned into “shared sacrifice.” Interestingly, we already know what eventually happens with this approach. Europe’s welfare states are now dealing with the wreckage of Obamanomics-type policies and the […]