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 […]

Michael Gerson is upset that the GOP budget would trim some money from the foreign aid budget. In his Washington Post column, he regurgitates Obama Administration talking points, claiming that less foreign aid will kill tens of thousands of poor children in Africa. USAID estimates that reductions proposed in the 2011 House Republican budget would […]

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 […]

The left already is wailing about the Medicare and Medicaid reforms in Congressman Paul Ryan’s budget. They don’t have any solutions of their own for these bankrupt programs, but they hope to scare voters in the short run and don’t seem to care about the nation in the long run. But, as Margaret Thatcher famously […]

The Chairman of the House Budget Committee, Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, will be unveiling his FY2012 budget tomorrow. Not all the details are public information, but what we do know is very encouraging. Ryan’s plan is a broad reform package, including limits on so-called discretionary spending, limits on excessive pay for federal bureaucrats, and […]

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 […]

Eli Lehrer of the Heartland Institute has an article in the Weekly Standard claiming that underfunded pension plans are not the problem with state budgets. This paragraph is a good summary of his article. In the end, many states facing very large current budget gaps—New York, Florida, Texas, and Wisconsin among them—have pension systems that […]