This election season has seen lots of talk (and demagoguery) about whether investors, entrepreneurs, and small business owners should be hit with class-warfare tax policy. And there’s also been lots of debate about the best way of averting bankruptcy for Medicare, which is the federal government’s health care program for the elderly. But there’s been […]

President Obama supports higher taxes, but he usually claims he only wants higher tax rates on evil rich people as part of his class-warfare agenda. Heck, he promised back in 2008 that, “no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not […]

I periodically mock the crazy statists of California. The state is almost surely doomed to suffer a Greek-style fiscal chaos. The only unknown is whether Illinois will beat the Golden State into default. The politicians in Sacramento impose very high taxes to fund a bloated bureaucracy that oversees a bunch of politically correct nonsense. But […]

One of my favorite Cato Institute publications is the Fiscal Policy Report Card on America’s Governors, which is produced by my colleague Chris Edwards. The report card uses variables such as the burden of government spending and the degree of class warfare tax policy to determine which states are moving in the right direction and […]

When I first saw this polling data, I thought we had some great news. After all, it shows that Americans – by a margin of more than 4-to-1 – want to reduce the burden of government spending. This comports with data from previous polls, including the recent survey showing nearly three-fourths of Americans don’t think […]

I try to be self aware, so I realize that I have the fiscal version of Tourette’s. Regardless of the question that is asked, I’m tempted to blurt out that the answer is to reduce the burden of government spending. But sometimes that’s exactly the right prescription, particularly for an economy weighed down by a […]

I’m part of a just-posted online Debate Club sponsored by U.S. News & World Report which asks “Is the United States a Nation of ‘Makers and Takers?’” My contribution to the discussion is basically a reworked version of what I wrote last week about Romney and the infamous 47 percent remark, so there’s no need […]

Even though I have remarked on many occasions that the burden of government was reduced during the Clinton years, that doesn’t mean Bill Clinton was in favor of smaller government. And it definitely doesn’t mean that his appointees believed in economic liberty. Consider the case of Laura Tyson, who served as Chair of Clinton’s Council […]

The great Ronald Reagan famously said (and I am paraphrasing, since I do not remember the exact phrase) that the most dangerous words in the English language were “I am from Washington and I am here to help you.” Those are very wise words, especially when we think of the damage politicians have done because of […]

If it wasn’t for the fact that so many people are suffering and being seduced into empty lives of government dependency (symbolized by Julia, the world’s most disappointing daughter), I might feel sorry for President Obama. He promised unemployment would never climb above 8 percent if Congress squandered $800 billion on a Keynesian stimulus scheme. […]