President Obama didn’t offer a budget plan yesterday. The White House hasn’t released anything beyond a set of talking points. But that’s not terribly surprising since his speech was really the opening salvo of his 2012 reelection fight. And it’s clear that a central theme of his campaign will be class warfare. But if we […]

Some people thought I was being unfair when I referred to the budget deal as a kiss-your-sister agreement. But as more information is revealed, it looks like the GOP got the short end of the stick – largely because they were afraid of a government shutdown (even though I explained Republicans actually did very well […]

Responding to widespread criticism of his AWOL status on the budget fight, President Obama today unveiled a fiscal plan. It already is being criticized for its class warfare approach to tax policy, but the most disturbing feature may be a provision that punishes the American people with higher taxes if politicians overspend. Called a “debt […]

If you are an average American, today is a great day. According to the Tax Foundation, you have finally worked long enough and earned enough money to satisfy the annual tax demands of federal, state, and local governments. This means you now get to keep any additional income you earn. That’s the good news. The […]

There were reports about 10 days ago that the crowd in Washington reached a budget deal, for the remainder of the 2011 fiscal year, with $33 billion of cuts. That number was disappointingly low. I wrote at the time that if this was a kiss-your-sister deal, we didn’t have any siblings that looked like Claudia […]

Just days after the introduction of a very good plan by the Chairman of the House Budget Committee, leaders from the Republican Study Committee in the House of Representatives have introduced an even better plan. In a previous post, I compared spending levels from the Obama budget and the Ryan budget and showed that the […]

Washington is filled with groups that piously express their devotion to balanced budgets and fiscal responsibility, so it is rather revealing that some of these groups have less-than-friendly responses to Congressman Ryan’s budget plan. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, for instance, portrays itself as a bunch of deficit hawks. So you would think […]

Forget all this talk about giant “spending cuts” of $6.2 trillion in Congressman Ryan’s budget plan. That’s music to my ears, but it’s also based on Washington’s bizarre budget math – i.e., the screwy system where politicians can increase spending but say they’re cutting spending because the budget could have grown even faster. What really […]

This Thursday, April 7, Senator Corker of Tennessee will be the opening speaker at the Cato Institute’s conference on “The Economic Impact of Government Spending” (an event that is free and open to the public, so register here if you want to attend). The Senator will be discussing his proposal to cap and then gradually […]

A new study from the Adam Smith Institute in the United Kingdom provides overwhelming evidence that class-warfare tax policy is grossly misguided and self-destructive. The authors examine the likely impact of the 10-percentage point increase in the top income tax rate, which was imposed as an election-year stunt by former  Gordon Brown and then kept […]